SBC News Jonathan Wilson - 'What Match Fixing Truly Threatens'

Jonathan Wilson – ‘What Match Fixing Truly Threatens’

jwilsonGuardian UK and Bettingexpert.com football journalist Jonathan Wilson believes that the impact of match fixing goes well beyond the immediate concerns of bookmakers and punters. Today, Jonathan Wilson tells us how the suspicion of match fixing can quietly erode sport’s ability to astound.

The day that Liverpool drew 3-3 with Everton, I was at a dinner with a former Test cricketer. When conversation turned to the Merseyside derby, he expressed scepticism. He wanted to believe in it, he said, but in international sport he’d seen too much to be sure: he had a doubt that prevented him fully enjoying the spectacle; he worried that, as he put it, “somebody had decided it should be a draw”.

It should be made clear that there is no evidence at all there was anything untoward about that game and, as far as I’m aware, nobody apart from the cricketer has any suspicions about it. I cite it purely as an example of how damaging match-fixing can be.

It must be a terrible position to be in, to have your faith in sport corroded to such an extent that you cannot believe in the unlikely or the extraordinary. And it’s even worse, of course, for the former cricketer. As the evening wore on, he spoke about his greatest Test match, when he picked up a number of cheap wickets on the final day to win a game. He spoke of his pride and excitement, of the knowledge that in years to come, when people mentioned that game, they would talk of his performance: with tears in his eyes, he spoke of writing his name into history. And then he admitted that he now doubts the reality of what happened, that when that game is mentioned he feels a sense of vertigo, a horror that he was the unwitting beneficiary of another country chucking the game.

And that’s why match-fixing is such a cancer. It gnaws away at everything that makes sport great. Write a drama in which one team scores twice in injury-time to turn a game on its head and people will call it unrealistic; sport calls it the 1999 Champions League final. Write a script in which a captain scores a duck and is sacked but returns to blast a devil-may-care 149 and win a game against all odds and people will call it contrived; sport calls it Botham’s Ashes. Write a novel about a snooker player who wears his glasses upside down, goes 8-0 down in the world final against a remorseless champion and comes back to win it on the final black of the final frame and people will call it ridiculous; sport calls in the 1985 World Championship.

Lose that capacity to astound and sport has lost everything. That’s why anything that artificially manipulates the game must be stamped out, whether it’s match-fixing or spot-fixing. The recent revelations that certain players may be prepared to pick up yellow or red cards for cash are in one sense ludicrous in that the ease with which such things could be manipulated means very few bookmakers would take bets – and certainly not sizeable ones – on such things, but desperately worrying in that it exposes a culture that is prepared to undermine the integrity of the game for personal gain.

And the integrity of the game is everything. Above all else, above all other considerations, that must be protected. If we cannot believe what we see, if we lose faith in the upsets and turnarounds and the collapses and the moments of genius that make sport s fascinating, we have nothing.

____________________________________________

Content Provided by BettingExpert – Online Tipster & Betting Communitywww.bettingexpert.com

bettingexpert

 Sports Betting integrity will be discussed at Betting on Football Conference

300x250-Brazil

 

Check Also

Oddin.gg sets up Peru Trading Hub for extended LatAm reach

Atlético Grau faces Los Chankas in Peru League 1 match-fixing accusations

Representatives from Peru’s League 1 club Los Chankas have made accusations about a potential match-fixing …

Sportradar Integrity Services: using data to improve match-fixing detection

Starlizard Integrity Services finds potential match-fixing in 167 matches

Sports integrity analyst Starlizard Integrity Services (SIS) has released its latest report on global football …

bulgaria

Bulgaria hosts FIFPRO and Europol as part of IntegriSport 3.0 project against match-fixing

Bulgaria’s capital Sofia became the host of an important international panel on match-fixing prevention and …