Sport Jim White
AGAINST THE ODDS
It is a certainty of modern life that, if you watch sport live on TV, you are never more than a couple of minutes away from a betting commercial featuring Ray Winstone. As soon as the half-time whistle goes, up he will pop on your screen, brooding and scowling, his image projected onto a tower block, his giant, disembodied head floating across the night sky like an untethered blimp. Once he was one of our leading character actors; now he makes more than the gross national product of a small African nation, growling out meaningless phrases: ‘I can travel a million miles in a single afternoon’; ‘There is no continent existing where I have not witnessed a ball being kicked, hit or thrown.’
There is no more depressing sight on TV than Winstone telling us, ‘It’s all about the in-play’. And this at a time when the schedules include such cultural highlights as Piers Morgan’s Life Stories featuring Nigel Farage.
Winstone is by no means the only one. In the break between sporting action, the ads are non-stop, with every betting company from here to Gibraltar pumping out a constant spool of urgent insistence. ‘Get on your mobile ... open an instant account ... it couldn’t be easier,’ they tell us. Then you can bet on this, bet on that, bet on the other. No wonder that, according to a recent Bristol University study, a quarter of men between 18 and 24 have a gambling problem.
Everything is now open to a wager, from who will take the next corner to who will be the next to receive a yellow card. Notoriously, even the chances of the tubby reserve goalkeeper eating a pie during the second half is now a matter for the odds-maker. And don’t worry if you are concerned circumstances might change and threaten your stake; you can always ‘cash out’. In the glossy world of the gambling commercial, no one ever loses.
What’s so disheartening is the implied suggestion that you can only really enjoy what you are watching if you are having a flutter. This is the insidious implication of the footage of groups of handsome twentysomethings, gathering in luxury flats to watch the football, while tapping away into their smartphones: for the fashionable, modern fan, gambling is integral to their consumption of sport. As one of the betting-company slogans says: it matters more when there’s money on it.
Once, as a nation, we reserved our flutters for the glorious annual madness of the Grand National, the rhythm of those April afternoons ending with the ritual Hoovering up of mangled betting slips. Now gambling has been allowed to infect every aspect of our sporting interaction. The broadcasters, the sporting bodies and the clubs themselves have become absolutely complicit in its relentless march. They have not for a moment questioned their part in its takeover of the national narrative.
Take the moment that Sutton’s roly-poly goalie exposed the absurdity of modern odds when he stuffed his face with a pie during his side’s FA Cup tie with Arsenal – to ensure his mates could profit from a bookmaker opening a market on such a possibility.
The authorities remain blithely unconcerned about the potential for corruption that comes with such widespread gambling. To see how our sport is in thrall to the bookmaker, look at how many football shirts are decorated with the logos of betting companies. Many of them now have ‘official gambling partners’, propping up their bottom line.
Until quite recently, only a small band of diehard punters had telephone accounts. Now every second of every sporting occasion is soundtracked by the nagging insistence that we get on our mobiles and hand over our credit card details to some offshore robot. Except of course there’s nothing enjoyable about seeing your bank account systematically pillaged. But then what none of the ads ever acknowledge is this simple truth: when it comes to placing a bet on a sporting event, there can only ever be one winner. And it isn’t the punter.