FSOM: Don’t be surprised about Match Fixing in Sport

When Captain Cook’s good ship HMS Endeavour sailed into the Pacific Islands, the natives were so shocked and surprised they fell out of their trees like drunken possums.

The reason so many moose are killed on Canada’s roads is because they are so surprised at seeing a fast-approaching truck, they stand and stare at it, with no concept of why they should get out of the way.

Penguins are said to fall over backwards in surprise if they see a plane flying overhead.

Some things in life come as a genuine surprise; discovering Madonna is not a man, that Chocolate Hobnobs are not a great dunking biscuit, that Tom Daley is gay and that England’s top order will struggle in the first innings of an Ashes Test.

But dear old Fifty Shades was astounded to learn there are actually some people out there who are genuinely surprised that match fixing takes place in English football.

It would appear that those who thought the English game is as pure as Taylor Swift are either a) hermits who have lived in a cave for the past 50 years, b) victims of a kidnapping by an evil wizard who resides up a tower in the middle of a vast forest , or c) working at the Football Association.

We Brits like to think of ourselves as the last bastion of fair play, a steadfast rock in a swirling, boiling torrent of cheating Johnny Foreigners who will stop at no underhand means to do us down.

Surely, all that cheating, deceit, dishonest, chicanery and dirty dealings begin at Calais and all point east? It’s just not the done thing for Englishmen to cheat.

Well don’t topple backwards like a penguin but we have previous form in this.

Back in 1964 a weasly little rat named Jimmy Gauld, who as a player had scuffed around the lower leagues with Swindon, Plymouth, St Mirren and Mansfield, was revealed as the mastermind behind a betting scandal which had systematically interfered with matches over a period of several years.

The uncovering of the scandal led to jail sentences for 10 players who were found guilty of betting to lose the games they played in, with the obvious inference that they were chucking these matches to cash in.

The most high-profile of which were three Sheffield Wednesday stars of which Tony Kay was expected to be included in Sir Alf Ramsey’s 1966 World Cup squad. The delicious irony was that he was named Man of the Match in the Owls’ game against Ipswich which he was implicated in.

Free with the Sunday Mirror this week came Ian Holloway’s DIY Guide to Match Fixing, in which he reveals that only three players in any team need be in on any scam to make it work.

The Gobby Hobgoblin’s theory is that a manager works on the assumption that he only needs eight of the eleven to be performing at full whack for the team to function efficiently.

That means three will be able to hide, and if in the past he might have thought they were merely having an on-pitch duvet day, in the light of the latest revelations, he might look at those three with a suspicious glint in his eye.

Cricket has been afflicted by gambling and match-fixing.

Pakistani players Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Amir were given spells in chokey and bans from the game for their part in the spot-fixing scandal where they agreed to deliver no-balls at specific times.

And who would ever have thought the apparent bastion of white South African virtue, Hansie Cronje would get entangled with Indian gambling sydicates to throw a game which cost him his career, and possibly his life?

The jury is still out as to whether the light aircraft crash which killed him in 2002 was an act of sabotage. Former South African Test star Clive Rice certainly continues to think so.

Snooker has been blighted to the extent that from now on, every relatively simple pot that is missed will raise an eyebrow and produce a tutting sneer.

Of course, the blasé assumption is that all these matches are fixed at the behest of the shadowy Far Eastern betting syndicates.

But the ease of gambling availability in this country should be a real worry, and the level to which even reputable bookmakers will now run books on games is quite frightening.

FSOM was a genuine toppling penguin not long ago when he saw a bookmaker offering odds on a match between Folland Sports and Sholing in the Sydenham’s Wessex League Premier Division.

That’s about as responsible as giving a sherry trifle and a heavily loaded rum baba to a recovering alcoholic and telling him not to lick the dish when he’s finished.

No doubt bookies have their well-honed ways of detecting iffy betting patterns and a lot of dosh suddenly being laid on a game that is played one step up from a local park, will get their antennae twitching.

But what’s to stop a number of players from either team getting together and spreading their bets across the county and then chucking the game to clean up?

After all, this is a league with little other than local media coverage, crowds in the single hundreds on a good day when there’s nothing else happening, and players who earn the sort of money in a week that will keep a Premier League player’s Ferrari in petrol long enough to get down the drive of his house to allow his gopher to take it and gas it up.

The temptation is there and it’s really down to bookies to be a bit more responsible.

The range of sporting events, and the means of putting your shirt on them multiplies as quickly as flu bacteria on a pensioner’s tonsils.

Not only can you bet on your PC, laptop, tablet, hand-held device, and via smartphone apps, you can apparently still pop into your bookie and hand over your cash in person instead of having it drained from your bank account quicker than a parent with a teenager on a gap-year world tour.

How long before bookmakers develop a chip to put into punters’ foreheads, allowing mere thoughts of betting to be transformed into a fully-fledged wager?

Betting has always been around as long as man has competed and history shows the Ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed a flutter.

Clay tablets from Pompeii show the Romans, especially, had a thriving gambling culture.

One records how one Maddicus Maximus lost his toga betting on a gladiatorial bout, when his fancy Gallus the Thracian lost his contest to Dropabollicus the Hun by a head, it having been chopped off.

The tablet shows Maddicus’s frustration as it reads: “Multi eorum fraudatores. auctor est in illa pretium tabernicus.” (Bugger, there goes the weekend’s beer money).

As bookies become ever more innovative and creative in offering their mugs – sorry, clients – different markets to bet on, who knows where they will cast their eyes?

In shades of PG Wodehouse where Jeeves and Wooster combine to thwart the devious Steggall who attempted to cook the books made on the Totleigh-on-the-Wold  village fete, school sports could be a fruitful market for bookies, although even here, there is temptation to fiddle.

At St Wilfred’s Prep school last summer, you could get a good spread on the field for the year six girls’ egg and spoon race, but favourite Milly Jones was disqualified after it was discovered her egg was kept on her spoon with the aid of blu-tac.

What next? Live from Sunnydown Dairy Farm, the milking stall stakes shows Daisy is slight favourite at 2-1 over the rest of the field to fulfil her milk quota for the day, with Buttercup second favourite at 3-1, Marigold at fives and the rest of the field at 10-1.

Still, we should be grateful that if nothing else, the new proliferation in betting and the scandals that accompany it, could see a return to screens of our old mucker John McCririck.

Now that would be something to make a penguin topple over or a South Seas native tumble out of his tree.

Follow @maisy68

This photograph was provided by Naparazzi.