When is a bet not a Bet?

It's been there for ever

    South African cricket has been shedding sponsors like a huskie in spring for many years and there have been good reasons for them to look else for value for their bucks. The new generation, at both domestic and national level, have largely been bookmaking firms.

    What fascinates me is not that they have stepped into the breach but the embarrassment and often disdain with which they have been greeted, other than from those whose direct bills they are paying.  

    Timing has worked both for and against them. A desperate short of sponsorship competition has driven the price of team and venue naming rights to unprecedented lows but, at the same time, they are perceived as hyenas feasting on a decaying carcass.

    Former England captain and now multiple award-winning journalist, Michael Atherton, wrote a fascinating book – “Gambling” - several years ago in which he explores and explains the history of betting across most, if not every conceivable spectrum.   

    “Gambling has infatuated human beings since the beginning of time. In Greek mythology the world was even created by a divine game of craps – Zeus winning the skies, Poseidon the seas and Hades the Underworld,” Atherton writes. Which makes the snarkiness aimed at Hollywoodbets, Dafabet, Betway and…did I miss one? G-Bets. Sorry. Anyway, they’re pretty much all involved in SA cricket.

    It may be obvious to those who have been involved in or followed South African cricket for more than 25 years, but Atherton addresses the reason for the current discomfort in the country. In a chapter entitled: “Say it ain’t so, Hansie” he re-explores the match-fixing scandal of 2000 and concludes that it was because “…the upstanding, God-Fearing, self-righteous captain of South Africa” who was the ‘victim’ of match-fixers which caused the horror which still exists in South Africa today.

    So how did cricket emerge with its ‘holy’ reputation as a sport of integrity after such a murky beginning? It was during the Victorian era when ‘properness’ and ‘etiquette’ wall-papered over real life, when sobriety and prudishness were pursued above reality.  

    Cricket’s first ever historian, the Reverent James Pycroft, was enormously influential in the reinvention of the game, or at least the way it was perceived. His mission, as was appropriate to the era, was to bleach away the sordid, real history of the game and whitewash it with a new, entirely different brush strokes.   

    “Certainly there is something highly intellectual in our noble and national pastime but the cricketer must possess other qualities, not only physical and intellectual but morel qualifications also. Such a game as cricket will both humanise and harmonise the people,” Pycroft wrote in his book, “The Cricket Fields.”   

    “It teaches a love of order, discipline and fair play for the pure honour and glory of victory. For the most part there is little to ruffle the temper, or to cause unpleasant collision…there is no place so free from temptation – no such happy plains or lands of innocence – as our cricket fields.”

    His writings gave rise to the expression ‘it’s just not cricket’, an expression which first found it’s way into the Oxford dictionary in 1867.

    Given that cricket was first played at a time when bear-baiting, cock-fighting and dog-fighting were amongst the popular forms of entertainment amongst the masses, all of which were motivated by wagers and book-making, it would be naieve to believe that early cricket was played for any other reason than the bets which were placed on the outcome of the game.

    The upper-class, landed gentry, had obsessed with gambling for centuries beforehand, and were behind the establishment of teams to compete in matches which, nominally, were for bragging rights – Norfolk against Suffolk, Duke of Wherevershire against Duchy of Cornwall – it was a substitute for war when war wasn’t actually happening. But the major reason was the wagers the bigwigs placed against each other.

    And there was endless skulduggery and match-fixing. Ace fast bowlers having rat-poison slipped into their meals – if they weren’t offered 20 guineas or a local maiden for the night – the tales are endless. Early cricket was far more corrupt than anything we have, or will, witness in the future. And yes, that is where the term ‘maiden over’ was formed.   

 

 

    There are endless, miserable tales of gambling addiction ruining the lives of individuals and families. It is a ghastly reality. Yet Atherton’s extensive research tells us that an astonishing 75% of the UK’s population bet, to some extent or another. Slot machines, national lotteries, the occasional horse-race, bingo halls…and then the other, more ‘hardcore’ stuff.

    Hardcore may be unfair. A betting friend once spent 18-months asking me for my opinion. After a year-and-a-half he had made enough money, purely from my ‘guesses’, to take his wife and two children to Mauritius for two-weeks. He sent me an e-postcard to say thanks. I briefly, not for the first time, considered my commitment to never gambling. I didn’t budge.

    Sports Gambling has not only been around for as long as sport has been around, it is often the reason for the existence of sport. Turn your nose up if you will, but remember you are in the minority if you do,

*NB – No book-making company sponsored this article. Or motivated it. (But drop me a line if you would like match previews. 😊)