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After you’ve hit snooze a couple of times on Monday morning, you check your phone and see how many times you won on the weekend.
Not your team – your betting account, on your phone. Then you go to work and throw back and forth with your mates about what you need to do to right things next weekend.
By Wednesday morning you’re scanning all the news for injury news and trying to jump on a favourable bet based on your injury hunches. Not much money.
Come Thursday you’ve read some of the form guides (how’s your form?) and will jump online tonight to find out the proper ins and outs and team lists for the weekend’s leagues. You check with your mates for their tips.
Friday morning you wake up and check a final form guide, read the footy previews in the newspaper and spend most of your day fretting – half over your picks and half over where your money is going.
By you spend Friday night watching the game along with the familiar faces of Phil Gould, Ray Warren and Tom (I Know What Punters Want) Waterhouse.
Saturday you are at the races or in a pub with Sky, next to the handy-dandy TAB box. You make a few bucks on the thoroughbreds but lament Fox Sports Super Sportsbet Saturday didn’t prove so successful.
On Sunday you wake up late, browse the news on your tablet and then jump over to your app to arrange a few last minute plunged on the arvo games.
You head to a mates house to travel to Centrebet Stadium and watch a game.
Just as you get there you realise you’ve missed a flutter on one of the games – don’t worry, sportingbet have an app on your phone to get you the last minute odds and the team line-ups (a more useful job for your index finger than poking a bikini anyway).
Good. Last wager made for the weekend. Then the alarm goes off on Monday and you reach for your phone…
That’s the ideal world for the next generation of sport fan according to large betting agencies that have Australian sports well and truly in their clutches.
Last night, ABC’s Four Corners aired a long look at the extent to which gambling has infiltrated culture.
It’s always a good time to take a heat check on this public discussion.
As Peter Fitzsimons said during his article, “…We have ten year olds lining up for an interview with Tom Waterhouse because he’s so glamorous. Is that what we want?”
The exposé started with the classic images of Tom Waterhouse appearing at the Channel 9 NRL hosting desk with the likes of Ray Warren and Phil Gould. He’s giving ‘expert advice’ on affairs that can only make him money.
Suddenly, Ray Warren and then Phil Gould, as commentators, are talking about what went wrong for them during Race 5 at Randwick. You can see a little bit of Warren and Gould’s souls disappear as they do what they’re told.
Tom Waterhouse has paid $10 million dollars per year for the wonderful opportunity to make himself at home in our lounge-rooms and sear the image of his face into our minds eye.
The influx of cash and very public advertising of betting has loomed large over sport since the High Court of Australia lifted limits on betting advertising in 2005.
I included links in the hypothetical weekly run down to highlight the absurdity this particular High Court decision has unleashed on all of us.
In 2010 an Irish company, Paddy Power, purchased Sportsbet for $180 million and in doing so inherited a company profiting $20million a year.
One of the only frontiers between betting companies and your money has been the rule that bets during games must be made over the phone or at a TAB booth. This probably prevents less impulsive gamblers losing more money and casual gamblers from diving into wagers due to inconvenience.
The CEO of Sportsbet had something to say, in his Irish accent, about that rule: “I think there is very little difference between the two bets… I think it’ll be changed during the term of the next government.”
If Sportsbet or Tom had their way I’d have to revise the theoretical week-in-the-life to include listening to radio because you’re too busy thumbing through their app to actually watch the game.
The public backlash against gambling has finally started mobilising politicians to enact reforms against gambling.
So far these reforms have been backed most publicly by the Greens, but other politicians are noticing a groundswell of disapproval of the gambling industry flooding our eyes and ears.
There will be a fight before any restrictions are put in place. The ideal image of sports fandom according to the gambling industry giants wouldn’t align with not being allowed to play ads during prime time television.
For instance, Tom Waterhouse is said to run at a loss of about $35 million because of a huge outlay on the advertising that would be at stake.
News broke yesterday that Tom Waterhouse’s attempt at not just advertising but being an official sponsor of the NRL to the tune of $50 million is dead in the water.
That is possibly a victory for common sense sports lovers. Maybe even the only good ramification of the More Joyous racing scandal if that affair being played out in public may have had a bearing.
There is still a deal in place with Channel 9, however, which is the more important one as the broadcaster determines the vast majority of what we see on the weekend.
What seems like an inevitable end point for betting in sports is the lure of money providing an opportunity for criminal elements and match-fixing.
Those are some of the critical questions that were raised most recently in the last few days over in the IPL cricket competition.
Spot fixing is almost certainly a part of sports in our shores now as well; some in the NRL has already been cracked down on.
The more money floating around these matches the more likely we aren’t going to get a fair result and the more likely we are to build our sporting experience about where our own money goes.
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