SUBMITTED copy is an essential element to the Warrington Guardian's sports coverage. (From Warrington Guardian)

SUBMITTED copy is an essential element to the Warrington Guardian's sports coverage.

With Dave Lawrenson

I am one of only two people who work on the paper's sports desk and it is physically impossible for us to cover every sports event that is played in the town, specially when you take into account the number of hours we put in at the office.

But there are times when I wish that I could see more of the action first hand.

There is nothing like being up close and personal and, judging by the information we receive from our valued and committed correspondents, Warrington seems to throw up memorable matches on a consistent basis.

One recent cricket report stated that a team's first nine batsmen were all dismissed for a duck. Talk about a bad day at the office.

There might as well have been a revolving door at the pavilion!

I'd have loved to have been in the crowd that day but my all-time 'I wish I'd seen that moment' concerns a soccer match.

Near the end of the match report there was a paragraph that really caught my eye.

It stated: "In the 76th minute there was an unsavoury incident that saw six players sent off."

Unsavoury incident? There must have been an almighty rumble for that amount of people to be shown the red card.

And it must have taken the referee an ice age to write his weekly match report to the league.

I can just imagine it now - I saw A punch C, B headbutt E, D boot F, E swing for A, C throttle D and F bite B. I took the appropriate action and by the time I'd sent them all off the sun had gone down and my arm was sore from all the card showing I'd done!

When I do get the chance to see live action I have a tendency to get lost.

The people that know me best will tell you that I'd get lost in a phone box so I was a bit pensive about my first trip to Leeds to cover a Warrington Wolves Super League match.

Usually when I cover an away game I catch a lift with one of the paper's photographers but on this occasion he was unable to attend so I was forced to go solo.

With the help of the thisiswarringtonwolves website's Super League guide, I managed to get to Leeds okay but coming home was a different story.

I was late leaving the ground after conducting post-match interviews with players and coaches and as I pulled out of Headingley Stadium I got stuck behind some Wolves fans at a set of traffic lights.

Their car was littered with Wolves scarves, flags and stickers so I naturally assumed that they were heading to Warrington and, in a bid to avoid constantly referring to the directions that I had scribbled down, I decided to follow them.

It seemed like a great idea at the time but after tailing the car in automatic pilot for 30 minutes or so it suddenly pulled up outside a house in the middle of nowhere!

It took me another two hours to get home. I wanted the ground to swallow me up and I have been the butt of many jokes after sharing the tale with my colleagues.

That's another reason why I want to spend more time out of the office covering sport live!