If you're going to do the corrupt thing then at least you should have the intelligence to do that corrupt thing well.
The following are the inputs of the Sky talking heads prior to the game and during the first half hour of today's Manchester United versus Wigan Athletic match.
"Score early and they'll get a hatful" - Richard Keys.
"United, going forward, scoring lots of goals" - Keys again.
"Wigan have gone 17 games in the Premiership without getting as much as a point off any of the Big 4 teams" - Keys monotony.
"The goals have got to happen soon" - Keys pushing his luck.
"Will this be the day when United run riot" - Alan Parry.
"The Champions are ready to go" - Keys introduces the kick off in a blinkered stylee.
"He [Rooney] has got a very good scoring record against Wigan that their fans will not need reminding of" - Parry continuing the good work.
"The only previous visit of Wigan's manager Chris Hutchings to Old Trafford was as manager of Bradford City when they lost 6-0" - Parry getting hindsightly irrelevant.
"Look at their side, you must be frightened, you must be frightened at how much they are going to come forward at yer" - Duplicitous David Platt.
"United must be so used to these games where the sides come not to lose" - Parry scraping the barrel bottom.
"United played 28 games at Old Trafford last season in all competitions and won 23 of them" - Parry matching the market price with a further load of piffle.
So, what was all this nonsense about?
Throughout the opening stages of the current Premiership season, the marketplace has been characterised by fractious fragmented cartelisations. Betting companies alternately ally with and undermine competitor companies in a desperate scramble to gain psychopathic and absolute control of events. Absolute control is critical as such a degree of leverage removes probability from the equation and an omnipotent bookmaker may exert market stresses on their competitors by thoroughly exploiting this corrupt advantage. Sky's trading team are analytically considerably out of their depth in this marketplace even with the games in which they claim ultimate control. Man Utd and Wigan was one such game. We pointed out yesterday that Mike Riley was officiating on a Sky live match for the 5th time this season and the Sky traders were very keen on a home win pre-match. But the market was not so simple in reality and nor is Sky's self-confidence very high as they have repeatedly had games snatched from their ownership this season - remember United against Chelsea? As a generalisation, it is very rare for teams involved in highly competitive Champions League events in the midweek (and Roma was one such game) to score rampantly on the following weekend. Furthermore, all trading rooms were aware of the incentives towards avoiding Man Utd being ahead at half-time and full-time as this is a mug's route to getting a better price on very short odds-on favourites - Riley was never going to give either of United's first half penalty shouts. So, all the "hatfuls" and "6-0's" and "running riot" and "being frightened" were quite simply rampant disinformation. The chances of United doing any of these things would have appeared to any skilled analyst to be highly improbable, particularly with Riley doing his utmost to ensure that the interval was reached at parity.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If Sky had been psychologically comfortable in the marketplace in recent weeks, they would no doubt have been able to stick to their corrupt trading strategy. But, being a second tier company with a lack of trading nous, they blew their advantage. Following the substitutions of Vidic and O'Shea, Parry and Platt audibly changed tack.
"Wigan will be delighted, the sending off of Vidic has taken the sting out of United's performance" - Platt's platitude.
"They must be starting to believe that this might be their [Wigan's} day" - Parry (yawn).
"There are a lot of very talented, very expensive players unavailable to Manchester United at the moment" - Parry getting suitably peripheral.
"Wigan have done very well in the first half. If they continue in the same vein, there's no reason why they can't get something out of it" - Butch Wilkins.
"United scored over 100 goals in all competitions last season but only seven in eight and a half games in this campaign" - Parry exactly one minute before the floodgates opened.
The problem for Sky was that they started to believe their own disinformational hype - they frequently are in possession of nuggets of valuable information but are unable to optimise the profitability of these nuggets as they cannot judge their trading horizons. In the very active half-time trading window, the Sky traders were desperately trying to hedge their liabilities by encouraging punters and professionals to take the best price around on a United victory. Fulsome control of both the pre-match and in-running markets was Sky's for the taking and they blew it. One of our contacts at Sky informs us that there has been numerous ruptions within Sky over their inability to nail their manipulations to the goalposts of profit and that Andy Gray's window of convalescence is linked to his poor input to the original market making combined with this lack of market savvy. Murdoch's men will still have made profit on their book but they simply had not got the balls to see their corruption through. The words "hoisted" and "petard" spring to mind...
This match was a £225 million pre-match market and there was a global television audience of half a billion people. Being one of only two Premiership games on the day gave the match a level of kudos that it did not deserve. Earlier in the week in The Guardian newspaper, Richard Scudamore slimed his way to the justification for such an unbalanced weekend timetable - it was all simply a result of four English teams having UEFA Cup games on Thursday apparently. Well, that does explain why four of the matches were to be on Sunday but what about the other four? The UEFA qualifiers were known months prior to the release of the fixture list and Scudamore's pitiful attempt at economy of truth was a forerunner of Sky's disinformation today. Now economy of truth is Scudamore's strong suit and, as with Platt, Keys and Parry, the reality can usually be best understood by inverting everything that oozes from their mouths. Of course, the actual reason for the imbalance in the weekend's Premiership fixture scheduling is the coincidence of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe - the kick off of the Fulham v Portsmouth game has even been delayed by ten minutes so that punters might "enjoy" the action from Longchamp. This is indicative of the likelihood that the hot favourite Authorized is probably going to get turned over in a nice little earner for the bookmakers.
The Manchester United versus Wigan game provided a very clear resolution of the different paradigms employed by the Asian and European market makers. The Chinese, being used to a pictorial language, are able to define and create the realities of other cultures in an holistic manner. When combined with the strategic thought processes that underpin all of their analytical input, these competitive advantages allow the Far East analysts to produce highly tuned models of other people's realities. The Europeans, in contrast, possess all the subtlety of a lump hammer.
Its akin to the innovation behind the game of Go versus the thuggery of conkers.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological