Andy Murray’s concern that tennis is still under the shadow of corruption was given substance on Friday when the Tennis Integrity Unit revealed that 48 matches throughout the sport in the first three months of 2016 have come under suspicion for irregular betting patterns.
While Murray’s most recent assertions targeted the suspected use of performance-enhancing drugs – a claim gently deflected by Novak Djokovic and more hotly contested by the Serb’s voluble coach, Boris Becker – he has always been concerned about the possibility of illegal gambling in the sport.
The TIU revealed one of the matches identified by the betting industry as suspicious was at the Australian Open, the first major of the season, which was disrupted by reheated allegations of past betting irregularities.
While 46 of the 48 matches – up from 31 in the same period last year – were on the outer fringes of the sport, in Futures and Challenger tournaments watched by very few people and often poorly supervised, the TIU confirmed that they also included one on the WTA Tour. The rest were in the men’s game.
The TIU said the suspect matches represent only 0.2 per cent of the 24,110 played everywhere in the men’s and women’s game. Last year there were 246 alerts – but no convictions. However, they provided no names, no venues, no dates – which does not discourage the view that tennis has yet properly to address allegations of complacency and lack of transparency.
The game’s leaders announced during the Australian Open the setting up of an independent review panel under the leadership of Adam Lewis QC. Friday’s TIU update reported no more than: “The work of the panel to date has included preliminary meetings with the sport’s governing bodies, collation of core documents and contact with persons of interest to obtain relevant information. In addition, the panel has identified a list of issues and areas of inquiry and begun a further schedule of interviews and research.”
None of this indicates anything of consequence has been unearthed in the three months since the original announcement. There was mention in the update of an unnamed player in a few Futures events in Hong Kong four years ago and news of a court conviction in Australia.
The TIU reported that on Monday the Australian player Nick Lindahl was fined A$1,000 and given a 12-month good behaviour bond by a magistrate for match-fixing. The TIU said it had “worked closely with Australian law enforcement agencies on the case since September 2013. Criminal proceedings take precedence over tennis discipline but, now that sentence has been passed, TIU investigations under the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program will move forward.”
No details were given about where “moving forward” would take the case.
Lindahl’s story has been written about previously and the Sydney Morning Herald returned to it this week.
“The court heard Lindahl told two men, Matthew Fox and Ryan Wolfenden, of his plan to tank his match [in a small country tournament] against qualifier Andrew Corbitt, knowing they would use the information to bet on the outcome,” said the Herald.
“Mr Fox stood to make up to $3,800 if his bets were successful but Sportingbet became suspicious and suspended betting when a flurry of bets were placed on what was considered a relatively minor tennis match between Lindahl and an unranked junior opponent. Nine months later, in June 2014, police intercepted a telephone call between Lindahl and Fox, in which Lindahl told his friend to delete computer files containing evidence of their communications so as to avoid detection by the Victorian police.”
Melbourne magistrates courts in December, 2014, found Fox guilty of corrupt conduct and fined him $3,500.
The Herald said the 27-year-old Swedish-born Lindahl, who grew up in Eleebana, a suburb of Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, had been, “one of Australia’s most promising juniors”. He was in the Australian Davis Cup training squad at 17 and, in 2009, beat Bernard Tomic in the qualifying tournament for the Australian Open.
But his promise never materialised and he went no higher than 187 in the world in 2010, reduced thereafter to struggling for a living on the edges of his sport.
If there is corruption higher up the food chain in tennis, the TIU has yet to identify it.
