Twisted fire starter, Richard Scudamore, yesterday finally achieved the desired outcome to his privately controlled and proprietary competition otherwise known as the Premiership. Three months after Dietrological provided a xmas freebie to both our clients and Football Is Fixed readers that a Manchester United triumph was inevitable, the culmination of that inevitability gained fruition with the usual corrupted input from the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) officials.
So, what determined the Red Devil's supremacy? Collusive behaviour, match rigging, bribery and manipulated betting markets, that's what!
The Premier League had a hidden agenda of several core targets for this season and No 1 on the list was a determination that Arsenal should not be allowed to win the title as a punishment for their refusal to sell out to the mafia money which supports the other leading teams. Corrupt cartels work in a much more monopolistic and optimal fashion when the corruption is complete. Arsenal's choice to remain outside the corrupt inner circle severely limits the autocratic power of this grouping of dodgy outfits. Think to the actions of OPEC towards the independent oil producers or NATO towards non-aligned nations (particularly those unfortunate enough to possess minerals or other valuable commodities) for a couple of externalised examples of a similar template.
Without the negative impact of the PGMOB officials, Arsenal would still be sitting at the top of the league. Instead, they are imploding under the pressure of coercive corruption and their sitzfleisch no longer exists. Scudamore must be rubbing his grubby little hands with glee. As must Alisher Usmanov as it can only be a matter of time now before the baby-boiling blubber boy attempts a total takeover of Arsenal - an act which, on completion, will hammer the final nail into the coffin of top flight English football being a sport and introduce a new afterlife of football as the equivalent of greyhound racing.
Bland Scam Sunday, a Sky theatrical extravaganza, was inevitably the media presentation possessing the exclusive rights to broadcasting the corruption in real time. Okay so, Setanta coverage might be mind-numbingly tedious but the viewer is never left with the impression that one has just witnessed a boiler room operation masquerading as a football match. Far too many of Sky's offerings are just that, boiler room scams, as various betting power bases fight for control over the corrupted outcomes of matches.
The pursuit of reality through the masks of illusion is the forensic analysis of our trading operation. But, what is the impact of this fake reality on the average fan or, for that matter, your typical bettor? Reality is trumped by inappropriate financial interests leaving the typical spectator in a strange twilight world of pseudo-reality - "it must be real as it is happening in front of my eyes and, yet, I know that it can't be as I've followed footie since being a kid and this doesn't feel right" must be the most common e-mail that we receive from readers. So, Chelsea's fans who chanted "Come back Mourinho" when the Blues were a goal behind to Arsenal were missing the point somewhat. Mourinho left of his own accord and will never return to West London while the club is under its current mafiosi management. A more appropriate chant might have been "Go away Abramovich" or a more syncopated "Putting the ball in the net when offside against Arsenal is a perfectly good goal la-la-la". Or, perhaps, "Get Cole to feign injury; Get Arsenal to put the ball out of play; Get Terry to kick the ball into the corner and press up; Get the winning goal". So so Chelski - if you are having trouble buying the match outcome then simply resort to cheating and an absence of fair play.
Sky spectaculars require, as a marketing imperative, that the week leading up to the corruption possesses a certain structure of exponentially increasing hype. The choice of template this last week was the referees. Under normal circumstances, we would regard this focus as positive but, David Moyes and Arsène Wenger apart, the output from the other talking heads was misdirected, to put it incredibly mildly. A week ago, Arsenal and Everton were mugged by Halsey and Bennett while Shinawatra City were given an invalid victory over Spurs via Thai stick, Mark Clattenburg. In the midweek, Mike Riley was forced to book Ashley Cole's backside due to the cheeky chap's impudence and the crescendo of claptrap relating to match officialdom moved towards its climax. Examining some of the quotes is more than revealing.
Keith Hackett (head of the PGMOB): "I am obviously very proud of the officials who put themselves forward for what is a thankless task. They are hard working, dedicated and honest, and deserve so much more respect than they get".
David Moyes (whose team have been targeted heavily by the PGMOB officials during the current season): "It is important that we do all respect referees. But I have said many times that I see many incidents when I do not feel the FA have respect for clubs and the situations that arise. Now they seem to want us to stand up and help them, well, it goes both ways. Clubs have made decisions (to appeal red cards) and been confronted with being told they are frivolous. Almost being told, 'sorry, we do not respect you so don't bother coming to us and asking'. There are many times we have asked for decisions, and me personally, for the referee to maybe turn around and say he has got something wrong and made a mistake. But they won't do that. So it seems it is okay to blame the players. We know they want us to give them respect, well they have to give us respect back also".
Arsène Wenger: "We have been very badly done (on decisions) recently".
Combining all this with the vacuous nonsense perpetrated by Ferguson and Benitez prior to the north west's premier derby and it may be seen that referees were all the rage leading up to the weekend. Perhaps a more enlightened body than the PGMOB might have considered laying low for a week or so to allow the accusations to be suitably sidelined by a compliant media. Not so. Hackett selected Bennett and Clattenburg for the big day.
Firstly, Steve Bennett achieved a celebratory threesome - Mascherano was the third influential foreign midfielder from Big 4 visiting teams to have been sent off in the first half at Old Trafford this season, following on from the similarly harshly treated Mikel and Emmanuel Eboué. The fact that Man Utd won these matches 9-0 cumulatively shows the success of such a strategy and offsets Ferguson's moaning about Clattenburg robbing the Manchester derbies, for example. Secondly, the assistant referee who failed to see that three Chelsea players were offside prior to the Russian/Israeli's equaliser, having made a similarly inept decision against Arsenal when Gallas was about to score in the first half, will hopefully have, at the very least, a new Rob Styles-esque patio courtesy of a certain Russian oligarch. He deserves it for the man certainly earned his kickback.
Yet again, fans are left discussing the hidden agendas of the match officials rather than anything so interupting as the beautiful game. Respect issues, as David Moyes so correctly stated, are a two way process. The PGMOB and the match officials expect respect from players and managers and, yet, this small grouping of 14 officials who referee over 92% of the Premiership matches treat everybody else in the game with scant respect - players, managers, clubs, owners, league authorities, the FA and, of course, the entirely disenfranchised supporters. Respect is a serious issue and is most certainly not represented by Mark Clattenburg's childish attempts at a pre-match pseudo-spudding greeting to William Gallas. Clattenburg - gangster's lackey #1...
The Free Dictionary defines "respect" as:
1. To feel or show deferential regard for; esteem.
2. To avoid violation of or interference with.
It is evident that respect is not reciprocated by the PGMOB officials as they tailor their match decisions to the requirements of a whole host of external bodies who should have no influence whatsoever on the match outcomes.
A number of these inappropriates are bookmakers and the short-termism of their psychopathic strategies were also brought into sharp relief yesterday. Global turnover on the Sky branded Sunday was merely 75% of the expected level and it is becoming increasingly evident that many punters are no longer willing to be fleeced by a corrupt cartel of betting companies. The bookmaking fraternity has failed to recognise that cornering a market is not feasible when dealing with an educated viewer.
The solution, of course, is to de-educate the watching masses - a far more rational overview of match realities may be found in inner city pubs than in the seats of the prawn-sandwich-munching-bourgeoisie who have taken over their season tickets. The media plays a vital role in this manipulation of your realities. We expect Sky and their stable of comics to push a Murdochratic agenda and so we turn, in hope, to the broadsheets for an holistic overview of this massive corruption. The Sun is propaganda but The Guardian is supposed to be a serious newspaper, albeit one for the chattering middle classes. Not so. Not only does this organ refuse to address the corruption in the game but also they have introduced a little ruse where readers can write in with questions to ask Keith Hackett. The supremo of the PGMOB is then provided with the column inches to defend his profession, demand respect, confront adversaries etc etc. That the leading left-of-centre paper has taken the corrupt bait is bad enough but The Guardian underlines its invalid position by also providing a platform for the betting industry to market inappropriate outcomes on future matches (via the input of Dan Roebuck of Ladbrokes Radio and Keith Pullein of the Racing Post). And, if this isn't enough to persuade you that ZNet, The Daily Kos and Al-Jazeera are the only valid sources of real news and opinion, The Guardian journalists then enhance the bookmaker's disinformation while, at the same time, making an insider killing on the betting markets themselves. So, Paul Wilson informed us that Liverpool were definitely still in the title hunt prior to Old Trafford (our "internal" price on a Liverpool Premiership triumph had drifted out to 1000/1 even before the game!) and that their advantage lay primarily in the fact that Pepe Reina is a great keeper. Really! Check out the two crosses for the first two goals. Paul Wilson - gangster's lackey #2...
In conclusion, we arrive at that most dysfunctional of locations, St James' Park. As the messiah celebrated his first victory since returning to Newcastle, he decided that it was time to eulogise about his captain marvel, the duplicitous Michael Owen. Little Michael is actually trying at the moment, a rare state of affairs, as he attempts to secure his England place - we've advised you before to check out Owen's goal occurrences in relation to international games. After Saturday's vital victory over Fulham, Keegan suggested that he is surprised by Owen's talents as they were conspicuous by their absence when Keegan was managing England. Of course, Owen was the main reason, along with the bookies, that Keegan was sacked as a string of deliberate underperformances both undermined King Kev and maximised the trading performance of Steve Smith's Goldchip private bookmakers to which Owen is linked via a business association. The messiah should not be counting his celestial chickens as we have no doubt that mastercrook Owen will return to type as soon as his position in Capello's England is cemented. Respect, indeed...
The most surprising happening in a not very surprising weekend was a philosophical comment by Harry Redknapp: "There's very strange rules all around, isn't there?". When it comes to the betting markets, football match outcomes and money laundering, there certainly are, pal...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
