Are Things Going To Change - Dont Bet On It?!

Now the dust is settling on the betting scandal that saw three Pakistan Cricketers imprisoned, together with their manager for conspiring to bowl no-balls in a test match last year, we can perhaps think about why they did it.

The obvious answer, of course, is money, greed and thinking they could get away with it, and as has been pointed out in cricket, it would be pretty easy to do just that.

When Football Business isn’t selling franchises to run 5 and 6 a side football leagues we spend a lot of time watching County Cricket, and to be totally honest if bowler A wants to bowl a no-ball then, who in front of 200 spectators on a cold Thursday morning in April is going to remember that it happened? Let alone, to be honest, care.

Of course, it could be argued now that everyone is under suspicion – and that, probably is the worst aspect of this. Every player is effectively “tarred with the same brush.” As an example, I was at a county game a few months ago when a player on the opposition was having what is known as a “no ball problem.”

There was a self-appointed “comedian” in the crowd who, on each occasion this happened, shouted “oh, somebody call the bookies,” there was a titter in the crowd the first time, a little less on the second, but by the tenth it had become downright annoying and you felt sorry for the bowler concerned, who given the attendance levels at these things, could hear every word.

You can only speculate at the level of coercion that took place to get Messrs Butt, Asif, and Amir to cheat. Maybe they were threatened, maybe they weren’t, maybe they were wiling accomplices with no conscience, maybe they weren’t. The fact is that only they know.

What we can be certain of is that this type of betting has been going on for ages. The now deceased former South African Captain Hansie Cronje admitted his role in a match fixing scandal, he was banned for life, but two other players implicated are still playing. Another cricketer implicated in so called “Spot Fixing” is on the England Test Cricket Coaching staff.

As sport becomes ever more like a business and there is ever more money being bet on outcomes, these types of stories will become ever-more prevalent. Certainly the scourge has hit snooker and football already, with World Champion John Higgins banned from the sport for a while and soccer games in Korea, Germany and Italy falling under suspicion and resulting in suicides, convictions and recriminations in the last few years.

And before we start thinking it’s a recent phenomenon, let’s not forget that four players were banned from football for life for their role in fixing a match in December 1962 between Sheffield Wednesday and Ipswich Town, and in his autobiography Matt Le Tissier said that he had agreed to make money on a bet on the time of the first throw in: Spread betting had just started to become popular. It was a new idea which allowed punters to back anything from the final score to the first throw-in”, he said.

“There was a lot of money to be made by exploiting it. We were safe from the threat of relegation when we went to Wimbledon on April 17 and, as it was a televised match, there was a wide range of bets available.

“Obviously I’d never have done anything that might have affected the outcome of the match, but I couldn’t see a problem with making a few quid on the time of the first throw-in.


“My team-mate had some friends with spread-betting accounts who laid some big bets for us. We stood to win well into four figures but if it went wrong we could have lost a lot of money.

“The plan was for us to kick the ball straight into touch at the start of the game and then collect 56 times our stake. Easy money.

“It was set up nicely. The ball was to be rolled back to me and I would smash it into touch. It seemed to be going like clockwork. We kicked off, the ball was tapped to me and I went to hit it out towards Neil Shipperley on the left wing.

“As it was live on television I didn’t want to make it too obvious or end up looking like a prat for miscuing the ball so I tried to hit it just over his head. But with so much riding on it I was a bit nervous and didn’t give it quite enough welly.

“The problem was that Shipperley knew nothing about the bet and managed to reach it and even head it back into play.

“Suddenly it was no longer a question of winning money. We stood to lose a lot of cash if it went much longer than 75 seconds before the ball went out.

“I had visions of guys coming to kneecap me. Eventually we got the ball out on 70 seconds. The neutral time meant we had neither won nor lost. I have never tried spread betting since.”

Quite why he tired it in the first place is open to question but it was probably money, greed and thinking he could get away with it. Which brings us back to the cricketers.

In betting it seems, as in life, the more things change the more they stay the same.