IT WAS, in the end, about so much more than the simple transfer of a footballer from one club to another. It was about magic, a flash of the wand and, in that flash, the fairytale transformation of despair into hope. It was about the rekindling of self-belief in a passionate but cruelly success-starved community.

But enough about Delroy Facey’s move, on a free, from Oldham Athletic to Tranmere Rovers — one of a number of deals that didn’t quite receive their due attention yesterday as the transfer deadline came and went. But Facey, we would eventually have to concede, picked an unfortunate day to move. What with Michael Owen being greeted at St James’ Park (a rare and heart-gladdening instance of the sheepish finding welcome as a lion) and with all journalists’ leave cancelled, there was a shortage of broadcasting manpower for some of the day’s other breaking news stories.

On another day, Facey could have relied on Sky Sports News, at least, to scramble a cameraman and show him getting into his car in Oldham, or getting out of his car in Tranmere. Or, if business was really sluggish, both.

Not that business ever is sluggish, of course, on Sky Sports News. Like every 24-hour, rolling news channel, Sky Sports News sets great store by the notion that there is no such thing as a slow news day — or, to put it another way, that there is no news day so slow that it cannot be happily sped up by the judicious use of graphics.

Now, sometimes on Sky Sports News, when the panel on the right-hand side of the screen is updating the leaderboard at some satellite golf tournament in the Netherlands and the ticker-tape along the bottom is breaking news of the mild ankle sprain that is set to keep Colchester United’s second-choice goalkeeper off training for anything up to 48 hours, you wonder. Mostly, however (at least, if any of this stuff matters to you to any degree) you sit there aghast and in dizzied agreement with the general proposition. This is the amazing lesson of rolling news. No news turns out not to be good news, after all; no news turns out to be an impossible state of affairs.

Yesterday, however, was indisputably not a slow news day. Yesterday — transfer deadline day — was a fast news day. And if that news was good for Owen, it was possibly even better for Jim White, the Sky Sports News reporter on the ground — and in the ground — at St James’ Park. “Jim, the excitement up there,” Rob Wotton, the anchorman in the studio, said. “ Can you almost touch it?”

Almost touch it? White was, by this point, wearing it. He had been with the excitable fans outside the ground since before 9am. He had been in a position to inform us, mid-morning, that Owen was being “choppered up”, which sounded a lot more painful than it probably was. He had witnessed the arrival in the building of Owen. He had overseen the “official signing ceremony”, wherein Owen obligingly signed for Newcastle United twice — once for television and once for the press. (Talk about kicking a man when he’s down. And does that mean that Owen is now sentenced to eight years on Tyneside, rather than four?)

All these things, White had been privy to. But, for the carefully suited reporter, it was all merely a lead-up to the climactic lunchtime moment when he found himself cast in a dual role — not only as objective witness to the historic events unfolding, but also as their compère. Everything that White said, culminating eventually in his interview with Owen, was relayed directly via the loudspeaker to the thousands of fans in the stadium, who bayed their approval.

To say White was inspired by this situation is to underemphasise the facts. Indeed, possibly only James Brown has worked a crowd harder than White worked the representative battalions of the Toon Army yesterday. And not since David Lloyd stepped up to the mic to introduce Ocean Colour Scene at the launch of Twenty20 cricket have television viewers witnessed a less likely outbreak of rock’n’roll attitude in a sports-related context. “We’ll ask Owen why he didn’t go to Liverpool,” White said. “Boo!” the crowd said. “Oh yeah!” White said.

“Shouldn’t they be at work?” Wotton, back in the studio, asked. It’s possible that someone ought to sit down with him and quietly explain what happened to Britain in the Eighties. Meanwhile, White was carried ever farther away in his call-and-response assessment of what Owen’s signing would mean to the club that are one from bottom of the Barclays Premiership.

“And they’ll be a match for Chelsea!” White called out. “Hooray!” the crowd said. “And they’ll be a match for Arsenal!” “Hooray again!” the crowd said. “And they’ll be a match for Liverpool!” “Hooray for a third time,” the crowd said. News reporter as cheerleader: it could catch on. “This is John Simpson, BBC News . . . Hello, Baghdad!” But who could blame White for his excitement? How often is a rolling news reporter guaranteed the direct response of a screaming audience? Or any kind of audience, come to think of it.

GILES SMITH RETURNS ON SATURDAY