Monday 30 August 2010

Never bet on anything that talks

The Pakistan cricket team continues to entertain. After snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against Australia earlier this year, they've managed to do it again, this time against England in a just completed Test Match. Despite having England at 5 for 47 and 7 for 102 in the first innings, they allowed them to score 446, and then folded cheaply in both innings (74 & 147) to lose by an Innings & 225 runs.
The team is now being investigated for match fixing, which was also raised in the context of their loss to Australia. Interestingly the Australia team still maintains that they felt their was nothing wrong with their win at the tine, although this may have more to do with Ricky Ponting seeing the win as a massive 'up yours' to the media who (correctly) criticised him for batting first on a demonic pitch.
Of course this 'see no evil' attitude isn't just confined to cricket. There were plenty of questions raised in 2004 after the Georgian team went down spectacularly 3.5-0.5 to the Armenian team in the last round of the Olympiad. Actually plenty of questions were raised *before* the Georgians lost, with the American and Israeli teams drawing the attention of the officials to a potential 'fix', after rumours of a betting plunge on exactly that result began to spread. And as far as I'm aware, these questions were never answered.

1 comment:

Paul said...

Big money and sport can create strange bedfellows !