Spot Of Bother

Just a couple of weeks into the season, and we've already seen one senior non-league team (Bromsgrove Rovers) fold, and another seems to be heading for real trouble.

More on Bromsgrove Rovers and their painful demise in another post, but it's the other club that is the focus of attention in Nonleagueland just now.  That other club is Croydon Athletic.  Their troubles have been overshadowed by the spot-fixing scandal surrounding the Pakistan cricket team, but the two issues are intimately connected.

This weekend The News Of The World  ran a story that has shaken international cricket: they claim that they paid a cricket agent, Mazar Majheed, to in turn pay some members of the Pakistan cricket team to bowl no-balls in the Test match against England at Lord's.  Apparently the idea was that a bet would be placed on no-balls being bowled at a particular stage of the game: this, surprisingly, is something that you can have a bet on with bookmakers based in the sub-continent.

Betting on sport, I should point out, is illegal in India, except on-course betting at horse races; all betting is, of course, illegal in Pakistan.

The players delivered; three no-balls were delivered on Friday with at least one of them appearing to be deliberate: it was something that caused some comment from the BBC radio commentators covering the game live, as I can remember.  No-balls, of course, aren't an uncommon occurrence in cricket, but the point about these, the NOTW claim, is that they were delivered to order.  I understand that the proposal made to Mr Majheed was that he would persuade the players to bowl a no-ball at some stage during a specific over; and that the NOTW reporters - who didn't, of course, identify themselves as such - would place a bet with an illegal bookmaker in India on a no-ball being delivered in that over.

So, what does this have to do with Croydon Athletic  FC?

Mazar Majheed is their owner.

There's more.

The club;s former chairman, Dean Fisher, was jailed in July for defrauding his former employers out of over £500,000.  And prosecutors claimed that he ploughed more than half of that into Croydon Athletic FC.  A club spokesman denied that any such thing had happened.  He went on to say that all money ploughed into the club by Fisher was repaid, by Mr Majheed.

Most people believe that Croydon Athletic was used by Fisher and Majheed as a money-laundering vehicle; and that the club's success on the field last season - they were promoted from non-league step 4 to step 3, or level 8 to 7 in the English pyramid - was financed with illegally-obtained money.  Fans of the club are furious, embarrasssed and frightened for the future.

Here we go, here we go, here we go . . .

This weekend saw the start of the 2010-11 English non-league football season - at least for those leagues it is possible to have a bet on.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to build this blog up into a resource you can all use to find information about non-league football, and fairly soon I'll be putting some non-league betting tips on here.