Recently I was watching the whole fiasco involving the accusations of match fixing between Pakistan and England. The amount of disbelief shown from everyone astonished me for so many reasons. I have no idea why people can not seem to fathom the fact that wherever there is big money involved, there will be corruption. Because there’s big money in sport, there is guaranteed to be a high level of corruption.
Boxing and Snooker are obviously areas with the worst rates of fraud, probably due to the fact that it’s easier to set up a match involving just 2 people. John Higgins was recently caught on camera offering to lose frames in a match for a 300,000 euro payment. He claimed innocence, stating that he played along as he believed the reporter to be involved with the russian mafia.
In cricket it’s not as easy to fix matches as it takes a lot more teamwork and fraud is easily spotted if large groups are involved (you can see if someone is deliberately creating a fault, or deliberately not playing to their full potential). For what it’s worth, I don’t believe there was any corruption involved in the particular game which caused all the controversy, but I wouldn’t be as quick to write off the idea that match fixing does not necessarily happen.
In football, it would not be tolerated in the slightest but this is perhaps because of the high prices footballers are paid (equivalent to that of some A-list celebrities). Therefore no good player wants to lose his long-term income for a short-term one-off payment (plus there is a chance of losing the ability to play professional football at all if found guilty of match fixing!). Maybe cricket players would be more willing to get involved with match fixing due to the fact that cricket players certainly don’t earn anywhere near what footballers do but I’m not sure.
All i’m saying is that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.