THERE WASN’T THE MONEY IN RUGBY TO FALL INTO THAT TRAP
IN ALL my time in rugby union i’ve never encountered an organised gambling school or gambling culture, one of the obvious reasons being that for decades everybody was amateur and had very little spare cash. Even in the professional era, nobody earns a fortune compared with many other sports. You read about there being card schools at the back of the bus on old-style Lions tours but i would imagine they were playing for little more than matchsticks or beer vouchers. Football is a different matter. During my year with Southampton i was surprised how the card schools started up as soon as we pulled out of the car park for an away trip and money was at stake. i wasn’t in charge of the teams, i had been invited on to the coach by the manager, which i appreciated, and it wasn’t my place to say or do anything. But it didn’t sit well with me. i like to think i always treated my rugby players as adults but if i had ever discovered a serious gambling ring in any team i was in charge of i would have acted quickly to stamp it out. i’m not a card player or gambler, so i don’t ‘get it’ on that level. But before a game — even the day before — i wouldn’t want my players being diverted down that road. The extract from Kieron Dyer’s book in yesterday’s
Sportsmail was startling. it seems only a small group of England players would participate but the amount of money changing hands was significant and enough, by Dyer’s own admission, to become a distraction to performance. Clearly it’s not a great situation if one player owes a considerable sum of money to another player in the squad. These things fester and get messy. Theirs was potentially a great team, a generation of incredible players. To get an insight now into what was going on is quite shattering. These card schools and gambling rings could potentially put pressure on teenagers new to the team to join in. Football is full of very talented young men, but when push comes to shove they are often still naive, with pretty limited life experience. They are earning huge money very early on in their lives and suddenly there can be a lot of pressure from some very big names and characters within the team to be one of the boys and join in. in the bigger picture, although England players gambling to this extent and becoming distracted at tournaments is disappointing and alarming, it is only a fraction of the kind of trouble many players, particularly former professionals, find themselves in. it seems the FA and PFA are coming to terms with how deep gambling runs in the fabric of the game and among fans. Let’s hope the current and future generations are given the chance to learn from those before them.