A former regional daily sports editor has died of cancer the week after achieving his last wish of meeting his first grandchild.

Tributes have been paid to Trevor Frecknall, left, who ran the sports desk at the Nottingham Post during Nottingham Forest’s most successful era under legendary manager Brian Clough.

The week before his death, he was able to hold his one-month-old granddaughter Liberty May for the first time after his daughter Claire obtained an emergency travel document enabling them to fly from Morocco where they live.

They were able to stay with Trevor for four days before returning home. “It was a very special moment for him,” Trevor’s wife Gill told the Newark Advertiser.

Trevor, who was 72, went into journalism aged 16 as a trainee with the Nottingham News Service before joining the Post four years later.

He worked his way up to be sports editor and would regularly travel with the Forest team in their glory years of European Cup success in the late 1970s.

Trevor left the Post in 1993 and became news editor of Athletics Weekly, where he remained until 2000 before becoming a media officer for UK Athletics.

Recently he had campaigned to get better services for cancer patients at Newark Hospital, in Nottinghamshire, after being faced with a long drive for treatment in Nottingham from his home in the village of North Muskham.

Olympic athletes who worked with Trevor have also paid tribute to him.

Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill said: “So sad, he was great for our sport and more importantly a really lovely man.”

World marathon record-holder Paula Radcliffe added: “Trevor’s warmth and genuine enthusiasm and love for the sport endeared him to so many of us.”

And Greg Rutherford, a long jump gold medallist from the London Olympics, said: “He was a lovely, lovely man that did an awful lot for the sport.”