FOOTBALL FOCUS
John Dykes
Seven minutes were left on the clock at St James' Park Monday night when Manchester City's Stephen Ireland flicked the ball up and hit a swerving volley from 25 metres.
Initially unsighted, Newcastle 'keeper Shay Given threw himself to his right and made a stunning save with one strong, outstretched hand.
The episode showed two players at the top of their game, football at its most thrilling. The match, which ended 2-2 after Ireland beat Given with another effort late on, featured a controversial red card decision by referee Rob Styles.
That has been analysed at length elsewhere but as far as I am concerned the game was made truly memorable by that Shay Given save.
Why? Because it was a reminder of football's ability to thrill, to amaze, to get one jumping out of one's armchair. More personally, it shook me out of a depression brought about by a day reading articles, blogs and posts on the subject of match-fixing in the professional game.
It was a subject I felt compelled to read up on after a string of match-fixing allegations; a Norwich City v Derby County game is being investigated after suspicious betting trends developed; investigative journalist Declan Hill's new book "The Fix" (a fascinating study of the structure and mechanics of illegal gambling syndicates) alleges several World Cup 2006 games were fixed; hardly a season goes by without someone from Malaysia writing in to ESPN's Football Focus and "explaining" how football is rigged, largely by Asian gambling syndicates.
So off I trudged to the internet, in search of conspiracy theorists.
Type "football" and "fix" into any search engine and you bump straight into Jerry Bullivant. Jerry is a "financial market analyst" who has written the footballisfixed.blogspot.com site since 2006.
His aim is to "expose and confront the corruption that blights the beautiful game ... to address the regulatory framework that allows such corruption ... to optimise the trading [betting] process ... to celebrate proper football."
Here's a sample of Bullivant's writing, starting with a September 29 entry: "There was massive fraudulent behaviour in the global betting markets on the weekend's matches. The outcomes of EIGHT matches were decided by controversial refereeing decisions, while extensive hacking across the planet severely disrupted the markets for Saturday's matches."
And more recently: "The Association of British Bookmakers claim that there were no suspicious betting patterns on the Norwich v Derby game, which kind of flies in the face of the fact that the corruption was exposed by Spreadex, a British firm. The money surfaced across the planet at half time, not just the Philippines. What are these people looking at? Yesterday, we traded on every Premiership game. Every single match was manipulated in one way or another."
Elsewhere on line, I visited a football tipping site which, under the heading "Advanced Betting Strategies", featured an article titled "Fixed Football Matches".
It listed Italy's Calciopoli scandal and Germany's bent referee Robert Hoyser as evidence of corruption and then made a sales pitch to prospective clients.
It read: "There is no monopoly that is single-handedly responsible for all or most of the fixed matches. At best, there is a fragmented cartel structure dominating the football betting market made up of different parties and for various reasons. Because there is the possibility that someone or some group of people know to a good extent what's going to happen for certain matches and will likely stake a sizeable sum of money on this, we can look for signals of this in the markets."
As you might have guessed, I am not in the habit of betting on football, or on anything for that matter. Don't think I'm claiming the moral high ground here; it's just that on the very rare occasions when I have taken up a colleague's challenge, or if someone has talked me into making a prediction on a match, it has absolutely ruined my enjoyment of the game in question.
Even Fantasy Football can be a drag if one ends up worrying more about "your" players' individual scores than the genuinely interesting aspects of any given game.
An advert for an online betting company in the UK uses the slogan, "It matters more when there's money on it". As far as I'm concerned, it matters too much when there's money on it.
The football gambler sees conspiracy in every refereeing decision, own goal and error. The football gambler cannot accept many of the vagaries of sport, and life. Just as religious fanaticism, political extremism or extreme personality traits lead people to bend any set of circumstances to fit their own viewpoint, so the football gambler watches a match in a blinkered, obsessive way.
I have no way of knowing if football matches are manipulated, nor would I dream of telling anyone not to gamble. I just know that moments such as that provided by Stephen Ireland and Shay Given on Monday remind me why I love the game, and really don't care who wins or loses, be it points or money.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Next
