The Fix by Declan Hill

Author:Declan Hill [Hill, Declan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-249-5
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

This is not to suggest that there was an explicit cover-up, the German FA did form a match-fixing committee to look into the Hoyzer allegations, but it does echo the comments from the English detectives and lawyers who were connected to the Grobbelaar investigation. One of them said, “At first, they wanted to help. But as the trial started, the soccer world banded together and would not help us at all. They wanted the bad publicity to go away.”

The final chapter of the Siege of Singapore in 1942 was, if possible, the most shameful of all. The outnumbered Japanese army had come so far, so quickly that their supply lines were shattered: they were to the north of Singapore but were at the end of their equipment. The Allies had 120,000 men in Singapore; the guns, contrary to legend, could swing around and face north – and yet they surrendered. There is all kinds of debate around the surrender but the psychological side of what happened to the Allied army is clear: they panicked. The streets of the city were full of chaos and disorder. Few people knew what to do. There was no effective central command and from stupid overconfidence based on racial prejudice, they turned quickly to stupid unnecessary panic.

The same is true of the European sports world.

Three years ago when I first started speaking out about the Asian match-fixers, I was greeted, for the most part, with skepticism and disbelief. It was a little like being an Old Testament prophet. I would come wandering out of the desert of research with tales of destruction and doom about the sport being in peril. People would listen politely but essentially not believe me. After a couple of years, I noticed that people had reached the rationalization stage: now they believed there was a problem but they would say things like, “Sure there is fixing, but it is only in the lower divisions, not the big games. The top teams would never fix a match.” Now they have reached the stage of resignation. “There is nothing that anyone can do,” they say shrugging the problem off as if match-fixing was as inevitable as cold in the winter.

They were wrong to deny there was a problem, they were wrong to think that top teams cannot fix games, and they are wrong to believe that there is nothing that can be done. I have shown that there is, in some clubs, a culture of supplying women to referees before big matches. There is a very easy, simple way of stopping that culture dead in its tracks – have more female match officials. “Hey, did you like the girl I sent to your room last night?” becomes, in most cases, redundant if you are talking to a woman. So if soccer associations really want to stop that culture, they should simply fast-track women officials. Of the top referees in Europe at the moment, the ones who handle the big Champions League matches and European Championship, none are women.

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