A WELCOME first collection from one of the more neglected, but most versatile voices of British sports journalism.

Patrick Collins of The Mail on Sunday always seems to have been mired somewhere in the gulf between the agenda setting tabloids and the tablets of stone broad sheets, which is perhaps the proper place for a sportswriter to be.

Twenty years seems too long for Collins to have plied his trade without his work being gathered up between book covers. He writes with a style, a range and a sense of humanity which mark him as one of the truly distinguished practitioners of the trade.

Collins handles narrative with the assuredness of a short story writer, while simultaneously pulling of the commendable trick of keeping his pieces free of gratuitous opinion. The only part of the Collin's persona which seeps through between the lines of the splendid profiles and reports in this collection is his love of sport and the manner in which he is so easily engaged by extraordinary sports people.

There are some fine pieces here. A long conversation with Jimmy Greaves is turned into a compassionate and insightful analysis of "the bloke from the telly".

Recently, an encounter with Tom Finney at the opening of the stand bearing his name at Preston North End's ground, skips easily over the pitfalls of old codger pieces and debunks the notion that things were happier and more honest in the old days.

His on the spot report from the last fight of Michael Watson on a poignant Saturday night in September carried the precise weight of considered regret and dignity the following morning as any piece written at leisure in the aftermath.

For a senior sportswriter, Collins has remained mercifully free of the plague of pomposity.

Just last February he stood outside the seedy Golden Gloves gymnasium in Las Vegas hoping to doorstep Mike Tyson for some sibilant pearls of wisdom. The result was 33 words from Vegas and a warmly amusing and slyly informative piece called "The Matoority of Mike Tyson".

Any serious sportswriter who can glean almost one hundred worthwhile, readable, well judged and truly lasting pieces of work out of two decades of battling with deadlines and bad phone lines and plain bad days is doing well. To have produced all that and to still convey the impression of being good company is as much as anyone could hope for.

Great value. Great work.