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AFL stinks of hypocrisy over Bock's footy gambling

Roar Rookie
16th December, 2011
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Roar Rookie
16th December, 2011
10
1470 Reads

We are in a right pickle, make no mistake. The suggested punishments for footballers implicated in betting ‘scandals’ have escalated sharply in the last few months, from Ayatollah Whately’s call for year-long bans to now, if you can believe it, imprisonment.

The electric chair is surely next.

Assuming that reports are accurate, our latest offender, Nathan Bock, told a friend and a family member what position he was likely to play in an upcoming match. Does this sound like a crime worthy of time in the big house to you?

One scarcely knows where to start with the perversity of the situation but let’s start with some basics. Bookmaking is a risky business. You win some, you lose some. Betting on live creatures (as opposed to roulette wheels) means that intelligence is king.

Until ruined by cash-strapped state governments, this was what made betting on horses fun. Bookmakers always knew and accepted that when they put up a price for a nag they were pitting their knowledge against the punter’s.

They also knew that people with knowledge about the horse would be among those wiling to wager for or against the conveyance. If someone had better intelligence, that was life.

The bizarre idea that racing authorities might create laws to stop this from happening would have struck anyone as a fundamental misunderstanding of the game everyone was playing.

So now the AFL is fining footballers in order to protect the profits of betting agencies? For talking to their mates? You can see where this is heading; players implanted with hidden microphones to make sure that, even on the conjugal pillow, they never divulge news of a painful in-grown toenail or rumours of discontent in the ranks.

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In passing, parallels here with governments bailing out insufficiently prudent financial institutions around the world are hard to ignore.

Nobody held a gun to the heads of bank managers and said ”You lend a million bucks to this unemployed garbologist or say goodnight.” And yet when they did their dough it was taxpayer money that saved their skins.

In the same way, it was only the AFL’s eye for a quick dollar that has ushered in wall-to-wall football betting. There was no public outcry for more gambling.

If they had so chosen, the AFL could have said to the betting agencies “Sorry boys. Betting updates every five minutes on televised games is just not a look we want for our game.”

But no. So when the inevitable happens, and some poor bookie gets stung because he was brave or silly enough to offer a price that was too good to pass up, it’s the player who is to blame?

I guess there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of it happening but there are surely untested legal questions that, if pursued, might find against the right of the AFL to impose these outrageous penalties.

At any rate, in what moral universe is a player talking to a mate about his footy a greater crime than what the AFL and its gaming buddies are doing to football?

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If the AFL is comfortable with ubiquitous ‘exotic’ gambling on football then a certain number of night-follows-day things flow from this.

One of these is that every little bit of information about the preparation of athletes and teams is now worth money. This is how it always was in racing and nobody squealed.

The AFL appears willing to accept all of the benefit – that is, cash – that comes with embracing a gambling culture but none of the risks. The risks are, of course, obvious and the AFL’s ever-more-convincing imitations of the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm do not change this.

So listen carefully Mr Demetriou: a betting culture means that sometimes bookmakers will lose and sometimes players will bet on games. History tells us that these are cast-iron givens. The more squeamish among players who enjoy a flutter will find friends to place their bets but it will still happen.

It is true enough that we live increasingly in a world that seems less comfortable with the idea that life involves risk. But we’re talking about bookmaking here; a time-honoured line of work, passed down over generations, inhabited by brave men and women who were prepared to take their bruises when they came.

And yet our risk-averse culture, or parts of it, seems not able even to understand that gambling is nothing without risk and the currency of risk is, yes, information.

It is not Nathan Bock’s fault that the AFL has embraced gambling. Why should he and other players be made to pay for this decision? And why should they now be placed in a position in which casual utterances to friends and acquaintances can cost them the money they have honestly earned?

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It is now only a matter of time before the current flirtation with rampant gambling in Australian sports blows up in the faces of those who made it happen. The clock counting down to the mother of all betting scandals is now ticking.

When it happens the people who run professional sport will first maintain their innocence, point the finger at the individuals involved as being bad eggs, and then eventually admit they probably went too far too quickly.

What then will history say about the custodians of our sports? It is true that holding back the tide of internet and mobile phone gambling would have been difficult, probably impossible. But this doesn’t mean that sport needed to bend over backwards to help bookmakers make more money.

If we are to have gambling on sport, let’s at least have real gambling in which people accept the inherent risks. And let us not scapegoat players for the decisions of others.

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