So celebrated Sky's scouse comedy commentator, Rob Palmer, after Julio Baptista had volleyed misery into the heart of Catalunya in last night's el clásico - the final major betting event of the pre-xmas weekend. We must assume that Palmer's inability to speak parallelled the speechlessness of anybody unfortunate enough to bear witness to the six massively corrupted televised matches offered for our delectation and delight.
For proprietary analytical reasons, we intend to focus on just three of these matches - the north London derby, Manchester United's pantomime performance against Everton and, lastly, the corruption in Catalunya.
We have posted previously that the major turnover televised Sky matches are particularly hot betting markets and that these events receive entirely inappropriate input from the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) officials - think Man Utd v Chelsea, Everton v Liverpool, West Ham v Spurs, Newcastle v Arsenal, Man Utd v Spurs and, of course, Liverpool v Chelsea. This latter farce was perpetrated by one Rob Styles who also took charge of Saturday's attempt at corruption at The Emirates.
Orwell reckoned that, by the age of 50, everybody has the face that they deserve - Mr Styles has fast-tracked this process and the players were correct to count their fingers after the post-match handshakes. There were four penalty decisions in the match and Styles managed to get every single one incorrect. Thanks to Almunia's penalty save, justice was done but the integrity of the game in England took yet another battering. This randomisation, at best, and straight market manipulation, at worst, has characterised the first half of this Premiership season - we might as well forget the farcical officiating and the football and allow the Pools Panel to determine match outcomes instead. Indeed, it is the bookmakers (who are the offshoots from the original football pools companies) who make these decisions anyway!
And, so to Old Trafford for the theatre at The Theatre Of Dreams. This match was entirely rigged. Consider the following statement which formed a part of the Dietrological Silver/Gold Information Service yesterday: "Weird shit! We advise three positions on this event. Buy Everton at +1.5 on the Asian Handicaps BUT also back Manchester United both on Fixed Odds and in the form of HT-Draw/FT-Man Utd. We believe that a one goal Manchester victory is an assured outcome". We never even broke sweat in the trading room as we watched events unfold and we profited further by selling Bookings on the Spreads after 15 minutes as Howard Webb attempted to drum up a fake competitiveness with his early yellows. Now over seventy thousand people remortgaged their property to be able to witness this charade and, additionally, anybody who took betting positions opposite the manipulation will be similarly out of pocket. Entertainingly, Steve McBettingman's half time summary on Setanta accidentally let some of these corrupted cats out of their coercive bags by allowing his innate stupidity to define our about-to-be-witnessed reality.
Before we discuss the corruption in Spain (which frequently favours the Castillian plain), there are a couple of other factors that came to light over the weekend. Firstly, Assistant Referees are increasingly forming a part of the PGMOB corruptions. Two Premiership matches at Reading and Villa had incorrect results after the linespeople made myopia a core competency - the match at Villa Park was particularly interesting. We had a massive position against a Villa victory on this match although we were forced into some defensive hedging on the morning of the event. Our angle was that Shinawatra required at least a Draw so that his publicity vehicle (the football team formerly known as Manchester City) would still be in the Champions League slots as the people of Thailand went to the polls yesterday. The elections are currently projected to give the Shinawatra-linked People's Power Party (sic) nearly 50% of the seats and rarely can a linesman's decision have proved such a striking example of chaos theory - a linesman's flag is not raised in Birmingham leading to a right wing kleptocracy being voted into power in Bangkok. More weird shit...
From Birmingham to Bangkok to Blackburn to Barcelona and el clásico. As Steve Bennett took longer than necessary to aid Chelsea's victory at Blackburn, the clout of the media and the bookies were clearly demonstrated when the Kick Off time for the Barcelona/Real Madrid game was delayed by four minutes to allow for the four thousand fouls by Blackburn in Lancashire to be counted. Delaying the biggest game in Europe for this?! Mejuto González was selected to officiate and all Scots will be aware that Snr González is crooked by power. There are two key ways for a referee to rig a match. The most obvious involves sendings off and penalties but the top level officials are so in control of the operation at hand that they are able to corrupt match outcomes by a more subtle control. This latter option was the only one open to González on Sunday as the backroom dealing over the selection of referees for el clásico is extensive and it is indicative of Barcelona's current lack of focus and spirit that their internal analysts did not undertake their homework on the referee. For González gave the Catalans absolutely nothing all night within twenty metres of the Madrid area. Barca's players were repeatedly blocked off, tripped or pushed to the ground around the edge of the area but Snr González had his focus on his cashflow rather than anything so restraining as the Rules of the Game. Blanca Navidad indeed - it will always be Viva La Quinta Brigada...
The weekend consequently began as it had started with institutional and bookmaker corruption undermining our beautiful game. Due to our access to highly privileged inside information and private money markets, we are able to create holistic overviews of these corrupted markets in manners that are unavailable to the general public. The only route to reality for the masses is the media which is their particular misfortune. We have repeatedly outlined the criminality emanating from Murdoch's manipulators at Sky and we wish to extend our focus on their corruption by addressing Sky Stats. At selective times during matches, Sky unveils little irrelevancies to float across the bottom of your screen - pseudo statistics that are selected to tilt your betting to an inappropriate externalised agenda. You know the sort of thing: "On the last seven occasions that Newcastle have equalised in a home match on a Sunday against a team playing in yellow, they went on to win". Oh, better have a tenner on the Geordies then... Also, Sky used to offer us many more options and services during the match. Remember the graphic to measure the 10 yard Free Kick distance? Well, we cannot have the PGMOB Boys being monitored so we'll scrap that. And, what about Player Cam? This revealing little service was a permanent grin in the offices as one was able to focus directly on the machinations of the likes of diddy Michael Owen as they underperformed to a hidden agenda.
There is a general openness across Europe relating to match statistics and data in all forms of media. This is not replicated in Britain as it will expose the players who are deliberately underperforming - Sky are simply not going to tell you that Frank Lampard has a 35% pass success rate or that Owen last had a shot on target prior to decimalisation. And, its not just Sky unfortunately. Earlier in the year, we posted that the PGMOB had met with representatives of the BBC Match Of The Day programme to "suggest" that criticism of match officials be removed from the programme. Lawro leapt to do the PGMOB's bidding. Gary Lineker is a harder psychology to read. One of the prime reasons that our Trading Team includes a Behavioural Psychologist is to psychoanalyse the manipulators and the talking heads both via words and deeds. And the deeds include body language. When Alan Hansen had the temerity to suggest that Rob Styles had got all four penalty decisions incorrect in the north London derby, Lineker demonstrated his Lawro links via his entertainingly aggressive body language.
We should boycott Walker's crisps in protest...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
