Cricket World Cup stirs up memories of amazing wides market coup of 20 years ago

On a midweek afternoon in May 1999 the Racing Post’s then deputy sports editor, Paul Kealy, received a fax listing a raft of special bets on the upcoming cricket World Cup from Sporting Index.

Being a grafter rather than a delegator, Kealy set about writing a piece for the following day’s paper even though his knowledge of cricket was so poor he could barely be sure how many balls there were in an over.

But he was, and still is, someone with an outstanding nose for value and soon after setting out on a quest for a possible decent bet to write about he suddenly realised he had stumbled across an extraordinarily wrong price.

Sporting’s dazzling array of tournament specials were largely an object lesson in diligent research and accurate assessments of what would happen. With one exception.

Total tournament wides were pitched at 245-265, a price based on historical data but which failed to factor in the key information that the 1999 World Cup would, for the first time, use white balls rather than the traditional red ones.

This might seem a glaring oversight that would probably not happen in this day and age when everything you need to know about everything is available within half a dozen keystrokes. But it was not as easy for traders back then to access data, and indeed it was not the only example of a feel price being way off line at around that time.

The first ever corners quote, for example, was 23-26, which is more than double what it should have been, and yet Sporting saw more buyers than sellers.

Anyway, Kealy looked at how the new ball had behaved in the warm-up matches and it was quickly apparent that bowlers were having grave difficulties controlling it, to such an extent that he soon realised buying at 265 was the greatest opportunity for profit in the short history of sports spread betting.

He called his then sports editor, me, with a mixture of excitement and anguish. He was delighted to have unearthed such a great tip but frustrated that he would almost certainly be unable to fully capitalise on it because he was unable to access the phenomenally low spread before Racing Post readers, as per company rules, and by the time he was able to get on the price was bound to have risen sharply.

Back in those days there was no internet betting and the only people who were able to access Racing Post tips before the papers arrived in the morning were a small band of hardcore punters who used to get the early copies at the main London railway stations at around 11 o’clock the previous night.

So, after Kealy had made it crystal clear there was a fantastic betting opportunity for spread punters to get stuck in to, those manning the phones at Sporting’s south London office braced themselves for a lively morning.

The phones duly went bananas the moment Sporting opened for business. Nobody wanted to do anything else but buy wides and the original 245-265 quote shot up 100 points in just 20 minutes with buyers limited to £2.

By the time the tournament began the buy price had soared to 500 but even that was far too low, and it took little time for Sporting to realise this was going to be a painful tournament.

England bowled first in the curtain-raiser against Sri Lanka, with Darren Gough and Ian Austin opening the attack, and there was a wide delivery in each of the first five overs.

That first game featured 21 wides in all and was followed by 55 more in the next two matches, setting the tone for a tournament in which bowlers continued to struggle with the white ball, and the spread soon spiralled to over a thousand.

Those who nipped in to buy at 265 found themselves in the glorious position of having passed that mark midway through the tenth of the 42 matches, and the last time an umpire held his arms horizontally in the final was the 979th such signal, meaning punters who got on for £2 a pop when trading began made a cool £1,428.

And there were plenty of them, meaning Sporting lost nearly £700,000 on that single market, which would have seemed so inconsequential when they created it. Consolation did arrive in the form of a lot of publicity over the story.

Their excellent PR team squeezed every last drop out of the opportunity the situation presented, with the wides tale getting huge coverage in the mainstream media.

It is hard to comprehend just how enormously the betting landscape has changed in the 20 years between cricket World Cups being staged in England. Sporting Index still offer an excellent service, but spread betting is no longer the sexy new product it was back then.

These were the days when if you wanted a bet of any kind you placed it in a shop or on the phone. And you either paid nine per cent of your stake when your placed your wager or had that amount deducted from your winnings.

A few days after the wides dominated the back page of the Post Victor Chandler dominated the front page by announcing he was heading to Gibraltar to kickstart the betting revolution by offering a tax-free offshore service, albeit the abolition of betting tax in the UK did not come until 2001.

In 1999 there was no Betfair exchange, no bet365, no mobile apps and no FOBTs. If you wanted a single on a football match it had to be televised and if you wanted to include a home team in an accumulator you had to include a minimum of five selections.

In-play betting did not exist and margins were higher. Sky Bet was still good old Surrey Racing, the big three consisted of Corals, Hills and Ladbrokes, and the main innovator as far as fixed-odds were concerned were Stan James, the first bookmaker to latch on to the opportunity created by Sky showing so much more live sport than before.

The constant buzz of dissent from restricted punters had yet to be established because the environment at the time meant it was so much harder to be a winner and therefore someone whose business was not wanted.

Bookmakers will still make the odd error, but their early-warning systems are now so sophisticated, and their intolerance to risk so great, that the days of any firm getting a hammering like the one Sporting took with such good grace 20 years ago have probably gone for good.

Why broadcasters need to look at the bigger picture

This column has many bugbears, one of which is the obsession of football broadcasters, particularly Sky, with showing replays when the ball is in play.

It was always going to be a matter of time before they were caught out, and it happened not once but twice during playoff weekend.

First, on Sunday, Sky viewers were treated to a lingering slow-motion shot of a fairly innocuous pop at goal producing a routine save but then they returned to the live coverage just as Charlton were scoring a horrific own goal.

Far from learning their lesson, though, the following day the Sky director went with an unnecessarily long replay of the Aston Villa manager expressing unhappiness that the referee had not played an advantage only for the action to resume the very moment the resultant free kick flew narrowly over the bar. It is inexcusable.

The reaction on Twitter shows quite clearly that viewers share my desire for the game to be shown as it happens and the replays kept to a minimum, and I can only conclude that this refusal to do so is down to arrogance on the part of TV bosses.

Another example of this came a few years ago when I objected in this column to race finishes being ruined by the director cutting to a close-up shot of the leader when most viewers were expecting to see how their each-way bets were getting on.

One TV executive accused me of not understanding how live TV works, a ludicrous response given it should work on the perfectly simple basis of giving the audience the shots they want to see.

And while replays are obviously a key part of TV coverage, especially when important incidents are shown again during breaks in play, they become a downright nuisance when they interrupt matches when the match is still going on.

Later in the League One playoff final Sky redeemed themselves when showing a lovely slow-motion shot of Charlton fans celebrating the winning goal, the key to this being such a glorious clip being that it took place when the game had yet to restart.

I would be all in favour of fan celebration shots as a regular part of the output. Football exists for the fans and it is always uplifting to see supporters going wild when their team scores.

And it is certainly preferable to these hideously self-indulgent shots of TV presenters and pundits celebrating goals in the studio.

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