It's definitely true. Whether anything is done about it is another thing altogether, but I do know that the police have been involved in the UK.
It's definitely true. Whether anything is done about it is another thing altogether, but I do know that the police have been involved in the UK.
That's fucked up on drugs. It's all gone.
Rugby, with its old school tie networks as embedded as in any sport, will be up to it's neck in this sort of thing. Perhaps not betting (I'm not sure if there's a huge market) but there's definitely corruption. Look at 'bloodgate'.Originally Posted by GS
Football being dodgy is a given. Certainly in relation to drugs. Not sure about match fixinf at the top level because players at least are rich enough already. Mind you, I guess it only takes an addiction or bad investments to wipe that out so no doubt there will be some involved.
Shit, 10 mins too late.
Link anyway: http://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/t...et#.rvdwb9m60P
No wonder Andy Murray managed to win two Grand Slams
Isn't tennis supposed to be rife with doping as well? They genuinely don't give a shit about testing or anything. Nadal is/was balls deep in it.
No it won't 'rock the game' because nobody cares. Same with athletics, cycling etc.
Yeah, in a long list of things people actually give a shit about, match fixing is pretty low down it.
And the Spanish national football team were linked also, were they not?
Certainly Spanish footballers around mid 2000s were. Real Sociedad are the only team who have been named.
It'll matter if it transpires Federer's entire career has been orchestrated by some syndicate in China, or whatever. Probably just some spot-fixing but there's been bans for match fixing before. Just they tend to get handed out to guys lower on the card. As for doping, there's been a couple of medium-profile ones but nothing proper for a decade.
Wasn't it common knowledge that Davydenko would throw the odd match?
I'm more interested in whether it's happened in Grand Slams than anything else. Nobody's going to care if Jose Acasuso dropped a couple of sets in an ATP 7000 Series Canada Open Event for Tennis Eventing, but if there were fixes going on in the slams, then people will sit up and take notice.
Also, nothing promotes match-fixing, spot-fixing, etc. more than the proliferation of pointless tournaments that the players have little emotional investment in, but which have plenty of money riding on the outcomes. Cricket figured this out when they realised that basically every franchise T20 league - in which the players have very little attachment to the side, and no particular concern about the tournament - was rife with it.
Tennis has so many tournaments that you find it hard to imagine that the players care about every tinpot cup they're playing in. There's huge gambling stakes on it as well, so it's kind of a perfect storm. It'd be interesting to think about what other sports generate the same accumulation of risk factors; how much do people bet on golf?
In golf the dynamic is different because it's so hard to actually win in the first place. If you win a tour event you not only get the prize money, but also exempt status on that tour for a certain period of time and entry into better tournaments - i.e. career security, which is a lot more than you have to gain from accepting money to not win something you're not going to win anyway. I've never heard of any suspicion of fixing in golf and highly doubt it would happen.
I suppose you could pay people to miss the cut, but miss the cut markets are pointless.
So are spot-markets in cricket. I immediately assume spot-fixing on any market based around individual balls.
"I just have a really strong feeling about the fourth ball of the seventh over!"
There have been suspicions about Grand Slam matches. The article Magic posted is very interesting.
They're there to placate the addicts, mostly. It can't even be very lucrative, doesn't take much money to get markets suspended.
I spend a lot of hours on betfair so the extent of matchfixing is quite apparent to me. Its incredibly obvious who is up to it, and it would be very easy if they actually wanted to crack down on it. Should really happen this decade.
That Albanian team you were posting about in the Europa League was cracking. Ideally you just ban that club from ever participating in any tournament again, and all its players and officials also get life bans. Make the punishment harsher than the benefit of doing it.
I'm 99% convinced that Cameroon, or some of their players fixed the game against Croatia in the last World Cup. This is one of the perils of group stages.
del Potro, I bet.
Djokovic just refuses to do it, doesn't he? Because he doesn't trust it. Which is obviously a totally legit reason to not do it.
There's probably gluten in the testing apparatus.
Djokovic's defence of Troicki was disgraceful. He basically blamed everyone else and absolved Troicki of all responsibility.
If you refuse to take a test after a match because you are "scared of needles", expect to face stiff punishment.
If it transpires that Murray is the only clean Top 4/6/8 player
I've always wondered about Djokovic, for two reasons:
1. Superhuman endurance
2. From a dodgy country
Neither of these constitute evidence, but it's all about the trend lines innit. When Tim Henman is retrospectively awarded 8 Slams we'll know the sport is clean.
Surely the 'they're all rich anyway' defence being applied to football upthread could equally be applied to tennis players of the level this report apparently implicates. Even those marginally inside the top fifty who have never even sniffed the real top of the game will have made a few million in prize money.
Djokovic's 'gluten free' diet turning him into superman (Reg, or others can correct me if i'm wrong, but from what I've seen he has the highest level of endurance on the tour by a mile) is one of the dodgiest, yet in plain sight, things going in sport.
Jimmy Savile's "I hate kids" defence was probably more convincing.
Djokovic doesn't "refuse" to be tested. What do you think they're going to do? Just say "all right then, we won't bother you again"?
Yev, I think that's a rather cynical view. Someone who was eating gluten when they shouldn't have been, and then eats correctly, is going to reap the rewards. Of course it won't be enough to make him the best athlete on tour, that'll be down to the work he puts in. He's known as being very dedicated and taking care of small details.
Not sure if it's worse than Nadal's months long 'injury' breaks to flush everything out of his system, but yeah.
Cynical it might be, but my brother has Coeliac disease and it strikes me as absolute bollocks. Is Djokovic even claiming he's a coeliac?
I don't know if he uses that term (I've read his book but can't remember). This article says strongly intolerant to wheat and dairy products. http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/t...c-8775333.html
Why so regarding your brother? Food is fuel for our bodies so it seems quite natural to me that it can have extreme effects.
Sorry, I mean I believe that my brother had it and I saw that the effects of it were bad (prior to him being diagnosed) I just fail to see how addressing it (particularly if you're not an actual coeliac), while making you better, makes you all but superhuman.
Why can't this be his natural potential? We see people in other sports with with seemingly freakish abilities/attributes, why not tennis too?
I mean it's not like he was a terrible tennis player before. He was what, no3 in the world before the diet change? He also made other changes including his service action. He's never claimed it is a magic cure. But like you say, the effects of it can be bad, and when your body is crucial to your performance then drastically changing what you eat is going to have big results.
There's probably some value in the idea that if he was training extra hard to be at the same level as everyone else because he was eating shit he shouldn't have been, and then kept training at that level once he'd sorted his diet out that he would be monstrously fit. I have no idea if that's actually what he's claiming, or if he's just claiming that cutting gluten out has been like putting the kryptonite into a lead box.
I long ago reached the point in the development of my cynicism where I just assume all sport is on some level corrupt. It makes the whole thing easier to enjoy and you're not at all surprised when the inevitable news story about match fixing and competitors' piss burning the bottom out of test tubes arrives.
Neil Robertson is on a 'plant based diet', which I'm sure is what enables him to miss the colours each time on those tricky trips back to baulk.
Peter Siddle exists entirely on bananas.
I watched Serena v Giorgi and it was a decent match. About the toughest draw Serena could have got and Giorgi put up a good fight, 6-4, 7-5. She got an impressive amount of aces but was as usual plagued by way too many double faults. It was the usual Giorgi in most other senses too: lots of power, very attacking, some great returns.
But the doubles are such a blindingly obvious weakness that questions have to be asked of her coach. She must be the most talented player on the tour (men's or women's) to lose so many points that way.
In other news Watson and Edmund both fell at the first hurdle; Djokovic, Federer and Nishikori all won comfortably.
http://www.sportdw.com/2016/01/suspi...iu-failed.html
Pretty good read regarding match-fixing stuff.
This shows that in the two days before the match, the price on Hyung Taik Lee to win 3-0 was backed all the way from 1.88 (53.2%) into an extraordinary 1.08 (92.6%). What makes this price especially bizarre is that it is actually shorter than the price on Lee to win the match itself.
To repeat that, the market was suggesting that Lee was more likely to win the match 3-0 than he was to win the match itself. As it were described elsewhere, this is analogous to a football team being more likely to win a match 2-0 than it is to win the match. In every possible way, this makes no sense whatsoever.
Watched Hewitt v Ferrer, good match. Fantastic fight from Hewitt but ultimately Ferrer played the same game except better.
Some potentially cracking matches tonight in Federer v Dimitrov and Kyrgios v Berdych (who has ditched H&M after they made him look like someone who picked clothes out of charity shops' rejection bins).
I'll give this a bump as others might like to watch or record the Federer V Djokovic semi final. It's the evening session so 8am UK time.
It's been a good tournament for Britain with Andy Murray, Jamie Murray and Konta through to semi finals.
I really like Nishikori, Raonic and Monfils. I'd like to see one of them win something one day.
Nice to see Konta do so well. The ladies have a decent depth in talent it seems.
Monfils hit a freakish shot against Raonic last night:
https://twitter.com/WeAreTennis/stat...47943957991424
I think a Slam will always be too far for Monfils and he's already 29. But I think the other two could. If Raonic plays like he did v Wawrinka then he could well beat Murray (who's shown in the past he can struggle against netplay).
I agree. Raonic seems to have the game most likely to wind up with a slam, although I don't think it's beyond Nishikori, either. He'd need some things to fall his way though, because he was a class below Djokovic in their match.
Well, I'm not sure this can be classed as a bumming. I've never seen a top player so systematically taken apart here before, can we be sure Djokovic isn't doping?
It's the lack of gluten mate.
Oh yeah, how silly of me to forget.
Djok is incredible. Those first two sets and the final against Nadal recently are as good as I've seen anyone play. I'm kinda looking forward to the day Federer stops reaching semis and finals, whether that's when he retires or not, because then maybe the crowds will be behind Djokovic. He deserves it.
Asia likes him a lot better. Asia knows what's up.
I never really understand the format of the Aussie Open. Isn't it fundamentally unfair that one of the finalists gets double the amount of rest before the final? Do they do this at the US as well?
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