Sports, is it a safe bet any more?

The Bob Woolmer murder has brought sports betting into the news again recently and it made me consider the possibilities available in sports for the unscrupulous participant or team.

Cricket is the sport that is at the forefront at present, with the issues over whether the World Cup match results had been manipulated for profit through gambling. Cricket also has the history of proven gambling with South African Hanse Cronje, who admitted accepting $130,000 (£66,550) to fix matches being banned for life, his team mates, Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams, received six-month bans.

Whether the current World Cup has been rigged has yet to be proven, but the doubt alters my interest in the event in much the same way that Ben Johnson forever changed my love of watching athletics back in 1988. Hero to zero in 9.79 seconds in my eyes.

Recent events in Italian Football has shown that it's not just individuals who can benefit from altering the result of an individual game or a series of games. Five clubs were implicated and more than twenty individuals were punished with fines and convictions. The match fixing was shown to alter final league positions for those involved. Horse racing which thrives on the gambling linked to it, is under total scrutiny at present with numerous jockeys under investigation for alleged offences.

Football and Cricket have both been tarnished by the results of games being manipulated to gain profit. However, it's the newest form of gambling that's harder to detect and easier to manipulate. Spread or spot betting is the fastest growing area of sports gambling and it's a bet that isn't reflected by the result of the game.

Spot betting can be as simple as how many corners a team has during a game, or in what minute the first free kick or throw in is! It could be the accumulated number of a teams shirts numbers in a football game, a quite common bet now with squad numbers in place. Some of these events can be altered without the end result of a game being in question and this concerns me greatly.

Getting involved with any sort of bet can obviously lead to a player being targeted by those who know he/she bets and encourage him to take things further.

I don't have the answer to this but know that I won't be betting on sports in the future.

What made me ponder sports betting?

I remember watching a high profile cricketing event last year and seeing the first ball bowled go so wide that it was widely replayed around the world - I wonder what the odds were on that?