Read all about it: 20 years on

It is 20 years since one of the most famous and iconic 'Pinks' went to print for the final time.

The Sports Argus was a behemoth of Saturday sporting newspapers: loved by sports fans, embraced by young and old, and even used as a 'scouting tool' by Football League managers up and down the country. It was an institution in Birmingham and large parts of the Black Country.

By 2006 the newspaper industry was being left behind, first by the proliferation of regional TV 'goals' highlights (Central Goals Extra, from around the mid-1990s), followed by the immediacy of Sky Sports News and digital media during the early 2000s. It is claimed one of the Argus sub-editors caught sight of the Central Goals programme, screened weekly on Saturdays at around 5.20pm, and declared the cherished pink to be on borrowed time. You couldn't expect a newspaper to compete with a TV programme screening highlights from the game you'd just seen.

The final Argus was a showcase of the limitations of newsprint: the match coverage of the 2006 FA Cup Final was left incomplete due to extra time. And therein lay the problem; content production that was no longer fit for a digital world.

I worked on the Sports Argus for five years. My first game was alongside the late Paul 'Scoop' Marston at the Bescot Stadium, watching him phone-in the Walsall vs WBA game. Later that same season I had the dubious privilege of covering the utterly chaotic Sheffield United vs West Bromwich Albion fixture; a match that would be concluded six days later during a Football League hearing. There would be many more games, all captured through a clunky Birmingham Mail-standard Nokia phone, with one hoping and trusting my Colmore Circus-based copytakers would reproduce my muffled words without any errors.

The Sports Argus was the bible for non-league and grassroots sport. Villa fans, Blues supporters, Albion followers would head straight to the dedicated club pages. But, for many more, the Argus was the first port of call for local sporting fixtures, meetings that went under-represented in other media. The weekly ritual was for managers, coaches and players to retreat straight to the bar after their non-league match, and wait for the arrival of those Evening Mail vans.

During the 1980s, I would know whether Albion had won or lost their Saturday game by the number of people queuing at 6pm outside the local newsagents.

By 2005/06 the Argus was being left behind by content production elsewhere. It was also a campaign where Birmingham and Albion would be relegated, and Villa would struggle. Sales were always poor when results were bad. I seem to recall there were only three weekends when all three teams played at 3pm on a Saturday. That didn't help either.

Thankfully, the Sports Argus lives on - to some degree, at least. West Midlands-based historian Norman Bartlam has produced a book all about your favourite pink. You can find details here: The Sports Argus: The Eye On The Midlands