In journalism, there are people whose brilliance is known to every one of their departmental colleagues but not to the readers. There are people so idiosyncratic that it is hard to imagine them existing in a more conventional profession. And there are people who stay so long in the job that it becomes impossible to imagine the place without them.
Jeremy Alexander, who died of cancer aged 81 on Thursday, embodied all that in a single individual. For anyone who has ever worked on the Guardian sports desk there is not just sadness but disbelief. It is the end of an era that lasted 57 years. Repeat, 57. He worked for the department from 1966 until his final illness in March. It may even have been his first illness; he claimed never to have taken a day off sick, and his facts tended to be reliable.
