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...
Harry Gregg is dead. Gregg was the best Manchester United player ever. He was the best, not because of his considerable playing skills, but because he was the hero of the Munich Air Crash. He ran back to the burning plane and pulled out the wounded before a massive explosion blew it up. He was a comrade, who corresponded with me for years. He was an inspiration for sheer courage and his indomitable moral...
Its about the grey market – il sistema - of points buying or match-fixing. This is the unspoken of secret that lurks at the heart of many European football leagues. If you have seen the announcement by the Spanish authorities of their request for a ban and jail some 41 of their top footballers, you may be scratching your head as to the driving mechanism of this alleged match-fixing. The scandal revolves around a match in late-May 2011 between two...
It was a dark night in October 2009. I was in a street bar in Asia. The girls were in the front. The serious men who did the business were at the back. They were in suits. Scotch whisky bottles open beside them. Their favourite girls pouring their drinks and pouting. They were some of the continent's biggest bookmakers. We were talking about the ways of the Asian gambling market works and the various fixes they had heard about recently. The phone...
Returning from three-weeks away to an inbox of e-mails from around the world asking, 'is the whole thing is a fix?'. Is Leicester City's triumphant surge simply a case of bunged envelopes, compliant defenders and compromised games? The notes have poured in from across the world. Readers from New Zealand to South Africa to England to the US, and many countries in between, have asked this question. The answer is no. If there were any fixing in the Premier League (which...
