There are some games that are far larger than just a sporting competition. There was that game in 1936 in Berlin when the England team were forced to raise their arms in Nazi salutes. There was that game in Belgrade between Red Star and Manchester United on February 6, 1958. It was to be the last footballing appearance of the Busby Babes. After the match, many of them flew off into the skies of football immortality in a crash at Munich...
Interesting week in international sports. Lets start with the Champions League where once again we have a ‘choke-point’ where games are regularly fixed. Here is the scenario. You are a UEFA investigator. The rest of the world thinks that you have unlimited resources and money coming out of your elbows. You know that if you’re lucky, the system will give you a bent paper clip and an elastic band for resources to stop corruption in Europe’s premier competition – the Champions...
This is the week for the Champions League fixes. The two matches to watch carefully (I do not say that they will be fixed, I am simply red-flagging the games) are Turkish champions Besiktas versus perennial no-hopers Dynamo Kiev and Juventus versus Dinamo Zagreb. Yes, the same Dinamo Zagreb of the infamous winking 7-1 loss to Olympique de Lyon in the same round of the Champions League in 2011. The conditions that make me red-flag these games are: 1) Neither of the...
It is a tale of two reports. The first was released last month by the investigators of the Cycling International Report Commission (CIRI). They examined the actions of Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) who govern elite cycling. Their report is a review of the colossal failure of anti-doping efforts in cycling over the last twenty-years. This failure came about despite tens-of-millions of dollars being spent on anti-doping and the deaths of a number of riders. The former cyclist Nicole Cooke brilliantly described...
