It's mad ted.
Author of Never Felt Better (History, Film Reviews).
It's mad ted.
It didn't take a betting expert to know the athlone V Longford game was fixed, myself and the two lads I sat with said it within a few minutes of sitting down, it just didn't look or feel right from the get go. Even the 7-1 win over them recently felt like a football match against an awful team whereas the alleged fixed match just felt more like a poorly put together show.
Is someone out to bring the club down by spreading rumours or is the club trying to bring certain players down by spreading rumours.
Word has it that it's four players being investigated. Interesting to read in today's Bray People where Harry Kenny was expressing his bewilderment about what's going on, said he'd 'talk to Denis' if he was considering his future with the club. Now, would that be the same Denis O'Connor who announced he was stepping down as chairman not so long ago? He's still around the Carlisle, what the hell is his role with the club?
All you zombies tweet tweet tweet.
I wonder what odds Derry got to loose by five goals against Bray.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/i...nzkn77f8x?t=ie
A First Division match in the League of Ireland is attracting up to €650,000 in bets on global exchanges, an inquiry into alleged match-fixing has been told.
While First Division games attract average crowds of less than 500, they are attracting huge interest from overseas gamblers, mainly in Asia. Details of the vast sums being wagered on second-tier Irish football were revealed at the Football Association of Ireland’s (FAI) internal disciplinary hearing into two Athlone Town players who have been banned for 12 months for match fixing.
Games in both the Premier Division and First Division of the SSE Airtricity League are being streamed on international betting websites following a 2015 deal between the FAI and Trackchamp. The four-year contract is said to be worth €120,000 a year.
The Irish Premier Division attracts an average of €2.5m bets per match, while the average attendance was just under 1,500 per game last season. By contrast a Premier League match in England attracts an average of €203m in wagers, while a Pro14 rugby game attracts €1.2m. A GAA match would draw just €50,000 in bets globally per game because of low understanding of the rules.
Evidence about betting on Irish league games was given to the disciplinary hearing by Sportradar, a betting analytics firm which has contracts with Fifa and Uefa. Alex Inglot, its director of communications, said an average of €650,000 in wagers on a First Division Irish football game was tracked globally by Sportradar. He said Asia was typically the source of more than 70% of these bets.
“It stands to reason that if you start offering streams and coverage on a global level, where it wasn’t global before, then you will see more engagement in that sport, and that will be heavily tied to interests in betting,” said Inglot.
“If you have a stream to view a sport, you feel more engaged in it and more likely to bet.”
Uefa alerted the FAI to “overwhelming betting evidence” that an Athlone Town match with Longford Town last April “was unduly influenced with a view to gaining corrupt betting profits”.
Igors Labuts, a Latvian goalkeeper, and Dragos Sfrijan, a Romanian midfielder, both of Athlone, were found guilty of match-fixing. The Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland (PFAI) insists the players are innocent and says it will bring the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, if necessary.
At the hearings, the players were asked about their earnings from Athlone, which had an average crowd of below 200 at games last year. They said they received only accommodation and food from the club. The disciplinary panel considered this as one of the three key strands of evidence on which its guilty verdict was based.
Athlone Town was notified of a new charge against it by the FAI last week over a statement criticising the verdict. The club now faces a charge of bringing the game into disrepute through its statement.
Last week a third Athlone Town player, Jason Lyons, was banned by the FAI for seven fixtures for betting on League of Ireland games, including three in which he played.
The PFAI has said the FAI should never have signed the deal with Trackchamp. While the English FA recently cut its ties with Ladbrokes, its “official bookmaker” sponsor which was paying it £4m (€4.5m) a year, the FAI signed a new deal with the bookmaker last September.
The FAI declined to comment last week.
In a written submission to the disciplinary hearing into Labuts and Sfrijan, Damien Richardson, an RTE pundit and former club manager, revealed he had been approached to advise an Asian betting syndicate when he was Cork City manager in 2006. Richardson said he took a phone call from what he was first told was an Asian radio station. The person then admitted to being from a betting syndicate and asked Richardson for his opinion on games taking place that weekend. He then offered Richardson a paid role as an adviser to the syndicate.
Richardson hung up and said he thought no more of the incident before he was asked to given an expert opinion in the Athlone case.
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