Congratulations to the many readers who took advantage of our repeated promptings to make money from the "certainty" of a Man Utd versus Chelsea FA Cup Final. There was never any doubt with regard to the validity of this position due to the marketing extravaganza that will be the first FA Cup back at Wembley.
The weekend's Semi Finals existed very clearly on two separate levels - there was the market information and then there was the spectacular society output.
Firstly, the markets... Corrupted markets of any variety are always a good source of cloned information for any market analyst. Similarly to volatile windows, there are proper returns for first mover advantage. Very few bookmakers ever priced up the option of "Name The Finalists" in the FA Cup and, among those that did, they either eliminated the Man Utd/Chelsea option or offered prohibitively scalped prices. On Saturday, all hell broke loose and, by kick off in the Man Utd/Watford game, we could not find one single layer globally that would accommodate any money on our "certainty".
Think about this for a minute. We were being asked to believe that the media was providing us with two competitive football matches but the people with access to inside information were unwilling to provide a "To Qualify for Final" market. Look at any other knockout competition and the bookmakers are falling over themselves to price up such markets as layers generally prefer markets with more potential outcomes. This was effectively a tacit acceptance by the betting industry that the FA Cup Final was a done deal.
Everything else is just spectacular society... Both games were under control - the Man Utd game offered such a major differential within the fundamentals that the event was a total mis-match while Alan Wiley officiated yesterday's Chelsea game exactly to our template projections. There was an infrastructure on the Chelsea game although we are not willing to publicly discuss this controlled format as it falls within our proprietary guidelines. But, rest assured that the control was absolute, complex and financially rewarding for insiders. On Grand National weekend, the PGMOB were taking no chances with the three British tv games - Wiley, Poll and Webb are top tier operators and occupy leading places in our Bum Ref Index (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/03/bum-ref-index-march-update.html). Blackburn and Watford never had a chance...
Sky television added a provocative extra twist to the Chelsea match by employing Robbie Savage as a studio expert alongside Keys and Redknapp - it was Savage who first got the Man Utd v Chelsea "certainty" into mainstream media!
This primary and secondary level spectacular society nonsense was supplemented by some tertiary level media trash in the ongoing public portrayal of David James and his magical thinking. As previously posted, Calamity was growing a beard until he achieved some totally minor goalkeeping threshold. To change his luck and to avoid starting next season looking like a muslim cleric, the sprite shaved off his beard before failing to reach the record at the weekend. I know that I shouldn't care about this but I do as the whole episode is helping us to enhance our Psychological Profiling of James and his narcissistic (and other) personality types.
Why do these people insist on making our job easier?
