Telegraph – Cricket and gambling have been uneasy bedfellows for hundreds of years but never more so than now. As the England and Wales Cricket Board pushes, along with other sports, for Parliament to make match-fixing a crime, is it simply a question of rooting out a few bad eggs or does there need to be a long, hard look at the way sport and gambling interact?
The ECB accepts advertisements from bookmakers and allows them to operate within cricket grounds around the country. It also sells TV rights to India, where gambling, apart from on-course bookmaking at horse races, is illegal but prolific.
Under UK law, none of what the ECB does is illegal and it has so far netted it hundreds of millions of pounds. Yet, for those seeking to harden the law against errant players sucked into the illegal bookies’ web, it is hardly the moral high ground.
With modern technology, it has never been easier to find somewhere to place a bet and to disperse the information that might influence the odds surrounding that bet.
Such ease has led to professional gambling cartels “court-siding” – where information seen live at the game is sent back to a colleague placing bets in order to beat the TV pictures, which usually have a delay from six to 12 seconds and from which the main odds market is set.
