Brooking The Trend

The Football Association is poised to reveal the Englishman who will join Team Fabio.

Actually the word poised in the same sentence as Football Association is inappropriate. Imbalanced, hamstrung, ridiculous, yes. But poised, no. 

Anyway the FA have been looking for the right indigenous man and an announcement is imminent.

Conducting the search is one of the good guys. Sir Trevor Brooking is the FA’s director of football development and he has plenty of UEFA Pro license holders from which to choose.

But who would want to work for an organization as deluded, deranged and dysfunctional as the Football Association? 

The manager is a 64-year-old Italian on £16,500 a day who was out-thought by a bunch of students from Cologne during the World Cup. Three years in and he continues to grapple with the culture. 

The players think they are world beaters and sometimes pass to each other but they are man marked by the tabloids and seem to care more about bank balances, body art and bling. 

And there is little leadership and no money. They have yet to find another chairman after the last one had to leave six months ago when a tabloid stung him right in his big mouth. And since the summer the FA have been without a main sponsor. They were banking on a big offer when England won in South Africa.

Sir Trevor, then, needs someone a bit special. He could do worse than select the best pundit in the game. 

He has played top flight club football, represented England youth, captained the under 21’s and but for injuries would have won full caps.  He has coached at every level and is passionate, educated, intelligent and articulate.

His name is Stewart Robson.

The Game That Ate Itself

The cricket insider spoke slowly and softly,

“If the public knew how much of it went on they would be shocked and disgusted and the game would die.”

He went on,

“It’s the talk of every dressing room and so is the famous cricketer who does it in the Indian Premier League.”

Then he mentioned the late Bob Woolmer.

“Most people think he was about to expose it and was taken out.”

Strong stuff but the insider declined to put his name to it.

The 2010 English summer began with the arrest of Essex cricketers Mervyn Westfield and Danesh Kaneria. 

They were accused of spot-fixing - a niche area of gambling where bets are laid with illegal bookmakers on specific occurrences during a match.

Last month Westfield was charged with conspiracy to defraud. Kaneria, a Pakistan spin bowler,  faces no further action.

But the extent of spot-fixing in cricket was exposed during  Pakistan’s tour.

On August 29th the News of the World revealed how two Pakistan bowlers and their captain delivered a  £150,000 spot-fixing betting coup during the 4th Test at Lords.  

England refused to play the subsequent one-day series unless the three were suspended. Scotland Yard began an investigation as did the International Cricket Council.

England won the first two games of five and were hoping to wrap up the series at the Oval.

Your correspondent covered the game in south London and it was a cracker.

The tourists batted first and made 241 all out off all but two balls of their 50 overs.  

England had a chance of winning until Umar Gul ripped through the lower order and Pakistan won by 23 runs. 

The restoration of faith lasted less than ten hours. 

The next day The Sun newspaper disclosed the fix was in and had told the authorities before the game started.  The ICC tried to call the game off but failed and, as predicted, the scoring rate slowed significantly during the 39th and 40th overs.

Does it matter? After all, spot-fixing has little or no effect on the outcome of a game, nobody notices and nobody gets hurt.  

Except they do.

Woolmer was coaching Pakistan at the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies when, after a defeat by Ireland in Jamaica, he met a sudden and messy demise.

The Times reported,

“...the white-tiled bathroom floor (and) the walls were splattered high and wide with vomit, his body was surrounded by pools of blood and excrement, and a bone in his neck had snapped.

An inquest returned an open verdict.

Five years earlier former South Africa captain Hansie Cronje was killed in a plane crash. He was serving a lifetime ban from playing and coaching after admitting he fixed games.

An inquest blamed the pilots.

And then, earlier this month, David Le Cluse, the chairman of Croydon Athletic Football Club, was found dead with a gunshot wound to the the head.  

The club’s owner, Mazhar Majeed, is an agent with close links to the Pakistan cricket team and was one of those arrested over the spot- fixing allegations.

The inquest has yet to be held.

None of this is news to people close to the game. A friend and colleague, who loves cricket almost as much as he loves his wife-to-be,  dismisses it as a conspiracy theory.

He may be right but fraud has taken root in a sport that already suffers from meaningless matches, flat pitches, negative tactics, poor attendances and formulaic formats.

Corruption is the straw that broke the camel’s bat.

p.s. how to fix a game of cricket