Probe referees, players betting in KPL

I was naive to think that matches could not be fixed! As a young lad playing for a team whose name I won’t mention, I witnessed match fixing live first hand. We were in division three, and we needed to win our last match to stay in that cadre or we drop to division four.

Most of our top players were still in boarding schools in different parts of the country and were not available for the match. That was the main reason why our fortunes were fast fading.

We had to assemble a team. Even our 40-year-old coach volunteered to play if we could not meet the requisite number of players! An Arab shopkeeper, who was our ardent fan and sponsor, felt we were going to lose and he thought of other means of winning.

It was in the early nineties, and this good man approached the prospective referee of the match to bribe him, Kenya style.

I do not know what he told the man, but he convinced him to take Sh4,000 and a kilo of miraa. I have never gone into a match with such confidence of a win! The referee was smiling at us when we entered the pitch, as our sponsor and coach sat calmly, chewing miraa.

We lost the match 4-0 and we were furious! We pelted the referee with stones as he fled for dear life to his mother’s house in a tough neighbourhood. His mtaa friends chased us away after a severe beating. Football Kenya Federation banned our team for four years for attacking a match official.

The umpire later told our sponsor that all through the match, he waited for us to reach our opponent’s box so that he could award a dubious penalty. We never even got near their goal. That was a match fixing deal gone awry! It killed our team.

APPROACH REFEREE

In these tech days, you need not approach the referee. He will fix the match himself since he already placed a bet for “the winning team”. He cannot afford to lose his cash!

Sports betting has taken the country by a storm. The craze has seen thousands of people place their bets even on teams they know nothing about. Betting may be good or bad, but we don’t care since it supports some of our teams financially.

What we worry about is the fact that even players and officials of the SportPesa Kenyan Premier League (KPL) are also betting in the matches they take part in. So far, there has been no evidence of this kind of betting.

We are yet to see a referee celebrating at the end of a match shouting nimeshindaaaa! or a player dancing with glee after his team concedes a goal. That notwithstanding, some decisions in the KPL raise eyebrows.

We must monitor our league closely. KPL chief executive officer Jack Oguda should be lauded for anticipating the problem of match fixing on the backdrop of the betting craze.

KPL is considering commissioning a sport betting data company, sports radar to monitor betting trends in the local league.

“We want to come up with a code to govern this betting craze, especially among players and referees. This code will be incorporated into players’ contracts and will be signed by club officials and referees.

“We are also negotiating with the Independent Policing Oversight Authority. We have asked them to give us three investigative officers to help us probe incidents of suspected match fixing,” said Oguda.

If this will be followed by action it will be a positive step in the right direction. We hope Football Kenya Federation will follow suit and apply the same to save the lower leagues where match fixing goes on unashamedly.

[email protected]