The Football Association has contacted bookmakers seeking their observations after payments were apparently made to punters who had wagered bets
HURRlCANES Womens Jersey at odds of 100-1 on the specific time of John Terry’s substitution against Sunderland. Paddy Power had accepted the bets on Terry being replaced between 26:00 and 26:59, matching his shirt number, in Sunday’s final Premier League fixture of the campaign, the 36-year-old’s last as a Chelsea player at Stamford Bridge. The then Sunderland manager, David Moyes, said after the match his team had “known it was coming” and had raised no objections. The visiting goalkeeper, Jordan Pickford, was reminded by Diego Costa and duly kicked the ball out of play to allow the substitution to take place. John Terry’s 26th-minute guard of honour send-off at Chelsea: fair or farce? Read more While the Premier League is believed to be relaxed about the matter, content the player’s withdrawal did not contravene any of their rules, the FA has now instigated a dialogue with betting companies to ascertain the precise chain of events on Sunday. The governing body has requested any relevant information. There is no suggestion that the decision to substitute Terry was anything other than Chelsea’s attempt to give their captain a proper send-off as his 22-year spell at the club draws to a close, and no suspicious betting patterns have, as yet, been reported. The FA’s rules regarding match-fixing state that: “Fixing is arranging in advance the result or conduct of a match or competition, or any event within a match or competition.” Comparisons have been drawn with the incident, still under investigation, in which the Sutton United goalkeeper Wayne Shaw resigned after eating a pie during February’s FA Cup tie against Arsenal. However, the bet involving Shaw was
http://www.officialhurricanesproshop.com/Andrej_Nestrasil_Jersey offered on the open market by a bookmaker, whereas wagers on Terry’s substitution followed an inquiry by a punter. “We replied to a novelty request for odds on John Terry’s substitution – one of hundreds on the Chelsea game – and fair play to the three punters who were on at odds of 100-1,” Paddy Power said in a statement. “To be honest the only mistake here is we should have clocked sooner there’d be another cringe-worthy Chelsea sendoff for JT.” Advertisement While Terry suggested post-match that he had proposed the substitution in the minute that matched his shirt number, it is understood the decision was made jointly by the captain, the manager, Antonio Conte, and senior players in the squad who had deliberated how best to grant the former England captain the best farewell. Conte had hoped to use the game against Sunderland, which was eventually won 5-1 by his side, as a means of maintaining key players’ form before Saturday’s FA Cup final against Arsenal. There was a precedent at Chelsea, with Didier Drogba carried off by his team-mates midway through the first half of his farewell appearance, also against Sunderland, on the day Chelsea lifted the Premier League trophy in 2015. Terry’s substitution process on his 717th appearance for the club had begun when the clock ticked on to 26 minutes, making it the 27th minute of the match, and by the time he left the field through a guard of honour formed by his team-mates it was the 28th minute, yet Paddy Power honoured the bets, saying: “Clearly the send-off was planned for the 26th minute to commemorate JT, hence why we paid outstatement
Mike Richter Jersey made by the Arsenal majority owner, Stan Kroenke – after the club failed for the first time in 20 years to finish in the Premier League top four – was clinically short, utterly unemotional, yet for all that, distinctly revealing of his motivation for involvement in the club. Stan Kroenke: ‘My Arsenal shares are not, and never have been, for sale’ Read more The US-based owner was, as usual, not at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday, where he would have found himself in a vortex of sourness and seen protest banners including the one describing him as a “leech”. His response was not the reaction of a man with Arsenal or even football in his veins, but a brief, two-sentence statement to the stock exchange. Even that was not a reaction to the final-day shakeout of the league table, in which Manchester City and Liverpool claimed the final two qualification places behind Chelsea and Arsenal’s keenest rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, for next season’s Champions League. Instead it was a blunt and somewhat insensitive clarification three days after the leaking of Friday’s news that he had turned down a ?1bn offer for his 67% shareholding from the Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov, himself a 30% stakeholder. The fact that a rare Kroenke public utterance, at this era-defining moment of slippage from the Champions League, was a brisk matter of money told its own story. That he should say of his corporate vehicle KSE [Kroenke Sports Enterprises] UK, that its shares in Arsenal “are not, and never have been, for sale” was odd and uneasily phrased. The next sentence, according
http://www.rangersteamonline.com/Nick_Holden_Jersey to Tim Payton of the Arsenal Supporters Trust, gave it away: “KSE is a committed, long-term investor in Arsenal and will remain so.” That self-description as an “investor” drove home many of the frustrations with him among supporters encapsulated by the “leech” banner. “That said it all, in that short statement,” Payton said, “he’s an investor, involved in the club to make money.” The US always had a commercialised system of sports, in which rich owners buy franchises in closed leagues, aiming in the modern era to see the values of their initial investments inflated by TV and broadcasting dollars, and the tickets, merchandising and food bought by the fans in the stadiums. Arsenal supporters who look over the Atlantic at their owners’ franchises will not see much inspiration on the field, with middling or struggling performances in the most recent seasons for the LA Rams in the NFL, Colorado Rapids in the MLS, Colorado Avalanche in the NHL and Denver Nuggets in the NBA. English football for a century featured mostly the rough compromise by which rich men did own shares and put some money in if needed, did not take money out and presented themselves as “custodians” of institutions we still call clubs even now. Arsenal were the acme of this culture, unusually upper class, with generations of shareholders never making a penny for themselves through long and successful tenures. It can be forgotten that the toxic stand-off now between Kroenke’s inert, absentee regime and Usmanov – presenting himself as a fan in the corporate box who would spend big money on players and win things – came about because the inheritors of the old Arsenal tradition cashed in
