Riath Al-Samarrai has been all over the place in the last few days, from interviewing Sweden’s most famous footballer in Stockholm to covering world title fights in Glasgow and Liverpool.

The day after prising a few hints out of Zlatan Ibrahimovic about a move to Manchester United and the day before being ringside for Ricky Burns’ crowning as WBA welterweight champion, the Daily Mail sportswriter found himself diverted to Cardiff for the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame annual dinner.

And there, some 20 years after The Milford Mercury published his first report of a football match, he won the Hall of Fame’s award as Sports Journalist of the Year before some 200 guests in the banqueting suite of the Swalec Cricket Stadium at Sophia Gardens, Cardiff.

Anyone following Al-Samarrai’s career will not have been that surprised, least of all his mentor, the Western Telegraph sports editor Gordon Thomas. He gave the then 16-year-old his first break and was sufficiently impressed to reward him that year’s Pembrokeshire Senior Cup final.

‘’Gordon said he’d pay something like twenty quid,’’ Al-Samarrai joked. ‘’I’ve been checking the post ever since. But, seriously, I can never thank Gordon enough for his help and encouragement. It was he who advised me to study journalism at Cardiff University.’’

For the Hall of Fame organisers, getting Riath to the dinner proved to be the trickiest part. ‘’Tradition decrees that we never tell any of the winners about their awards in advance,’’ said Peter Jackson, the Daily Mail’s former rugby correspondent and one of the Hall of Fame’s trustees. ‘’When I rang Riath and invited him, he was delighted but needed to check his diary.

‘’It confirmed that he would be in Glasgow that night in readiness for the Burns title fight the next day. Rather than give up, we used a bit of subterfuge to get him there.

‘’I rang Lee Clayton, my old boss as the Mail’s head of sport, and told him in strict confidence about the award we planned to give Riath. Lee cleared the decks, took Riath off the Burns fight preview in Glasgow and sent him to Cardiff instead on the pretext of doing a piece on Neville Southall.

‘’The great goalie was there as one of four inductees into the Hall of Fame. So Riath turned up without a clue as to the real reason for his being there.’’

He was still none the wiser until just before Jackson made the formal announcement when he referred to The Western Telegraph.

‘’The lovely thing about the Welsh Sports Journalist of the Year award is that every year we are spoilt for choice,’’ Jackson told guests. ‘’Every year new talent springs up, in the papers, on the road and on television.

‘’It used to be, long ago when I was young, that if you wanted to get to Fleet Street you took a very rocky road, from a weekly paper, to a regional morning or evening and from there to one of the nationals.

‘’Our award tonight has made that journey. He knows what it’s like to start at the bottom, to volunteer for work covering local football matches for a weekly paper in Pembrokeshire.

‘’The money, or more accurately the lack of it, didn’t matter. The young fellow was smart enough to realise that no amount of money could buy the experience which the paper would give him but then The Western Telegraph has an enviable reputation for taking local lads and sending them a very long way.

‘’I’ll name three. Steve Evans covered the Twin Towers disaster for BBC Television and is now their Asia Correspondent based in Seoul. Huw Whittow is editor of the Express and Geoff Williams head of sport at BBC Wales.

‘’Now a new name can be added to that list, one who has made a real impact since seizing his chance in the competitive ferocity of the freelance world in London after graduating from Cardiff University.

‘’He has already been nominated three times for the coveted UK awards made annually by the Sports Journalists Association, a reflection of the impact he has made at a newspaper with a fearsome reputation as the most demanding in the business.

‘’They value his news sense, his writing and ability to cover all sports but mainly football and boxing as well as a rare capacity for getting the big names to talk about themselves.’’

On a night when Glamorgan cricketer Alan Jones, Olympic gold medal oarsman Tom James, Wales goalkeeper Neville Southall and the late Wales football manager Gary Speed were inducted into the Hall of Fame, Geoff Williams was called up to present the award to Al-Samarrai, one Haverfordwest native to another.

Al-Samarrai, whose mother, Margaret, comes from Haverfordwest and whose Iraqi father, Qahtan, was an orthopaedic surgeon at Withybush hospital until his death in 2001, has never forgotten his roots, nor his first report for the Mercury.

‘’I’d broken my leg playing football for Prendergast Villa and my first report was on my come-back match. And you know what? It said I was excellent…’’