Match Fixer

Neil Humphreys

Description

Match Fixer takes place inside the murky underbelly of Asian Football. The so-called squeaky clean city-state of Singapore plays host to betting syndicates which have for decades fed off the insatiable illegal gambling habits of the local population and in the process made a select few bookies very rich and far too powerful. Neil Humpreys, a former Football correspondent for the national Singapore press, lifts the lid off a previously unexplored - but very real - subject. In his debut novel, corruption is destroying the Beautiful Game in Asia and has spread its tentacles into the UK via spread betting cartels that have already knocked out floodlights and caused chaos in the English Premier League. Against such a background, former West Ham United apprentice striker Chris Osborne arrives in Singapore for a final roll of the dice to get his once promising career back on track. However not even a boyhood spent growing up in the East End prepares him for the crooked shenanigans, bloated former British footballing jetsam and the underground party drugs scene that welcomes him to life in paradise.

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendish
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814346054
• Langue: English

Extrait

A brilliant journey from the harsh realities of making the grade in the English Premiership, via the A-League and onto the sobering realities of football corruption in Asia - 9/10
Trevor Treharne, Australian FourFourTwo magazine
Being an old West Ham boy who grew up in East London and played in Malaysia, it s clear to me that Neil Humphreys knows this world. Match Fixer paints a vivid picture-colourful, exciting and unpredictable. It really is a fascinating book.
Tony Cottee, former England, West Ham, Everton and Selangor striker
Knowing Singapore rather well, and now that I find myself working in the game, I think Match Fixer has an intriguing insider s perspective of both worlds. It s an engrossing look at the Asian football scene.
Nick Leeson, Galway United CEO and author of Rogue Trader
Football, sex, drugs, gangsters and match fixing in squeaky-clean Singapore? Humphreys exposes the dirty underbelly of soccer corruption in the way only an insider truly can. I know it s fiction, but like the Da Vinci Code, the underlying truth in Match Fixer leaves you wondering what s real and what s not.
S Murali, The New Paper (Singapore)
Riveting and uncompromising, Match Fixer sucks you in, and never relents until the sobering end. A fascinating read.
Chia Han Keong, My Paper (Singapore)
When East End dreams turn into Far East nightmare. Match Fixer is a rattling good read. It s gripping stuff.
Tony McDonald, Ex-Hammers magazine editor and author of West Ham United: The Managers
Americans may not know anything about English football-heck, we re not even sure that short-pants stuff really is football. But there s nothing we love more than a scandal that runs all the way up to the big guys. Neil Humphreys delivers that and more in the form of a bang-up tale of an English footballer adrift in the perplexing land of Singapore, a hard-edged odyssey of sex, drugs and football that will keep you turning pages to the very end. I friggin loved it.
Jake Needham, author of the best-selling crime fiction novel, The Big Mango

2010 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited Reprinted 2010
Cover art by OpalWorks Co. Ltd
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
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National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data Humphreys, Neil. Match fixer / Neil Humphreys. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2010. p. cm. eISBN-13 : 978-981-4346-05-4
1. Soccer players - Singapore - Fiction. 2. Gambling - Singapore - Fiction. 3. Organized crime - Singapore - Fiction. I. Title.
PR6108 823.92 - dc22 OCN441572963
Printed and bound in Great Britain by T J International Limited, Padstow, Cornwall
for Chris Newson
acknowledgements
Chris sat me down in a Singapore coffee shop and bought me a hot chocolate that lasted four hours. The conversation started with do you remember all your daft theories about football corruption? and ended with an outline for Match Fixer. Thanks for the idea, Chris.
The outline and daft theories are mine so I take full responsibility. Shawn and Mei Lin then encouraged my sex, drugs and football conspiracies further, and helped me bash them into shape.
We ve all read stories about corrupt footballers and watched football matches that were corrupt. This book would not have been possible without either. Long live The Beautiful Game.
This is a work of fiction and the characters portrayed do not exist. It is a story about an aspiring footballer from East London who ends up in Singapore; it is not a book about football. Any similarity or apparent connection between the characters in the story and actual persons, whether alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
one
TIGER grabbed his mask. The mid-afternoon heat was particularly stifling and he could already feel the sweat trickling down his temple. This was not a particularly astute idea, but he had no choice. Whacking an S-League footballer behind the knees with a baseball bat in front of a security guard outside a condo was not a wise career move at the best of times, but to do it off Orchard Road, the busiest shopping district in Singapore, was nothing short of career suicide. But he had no choice. Orders were orders.
Dressed head to toe in black, Tiger wiped his forehead again and reached for his bat in the passenger s seat. He knew what to do. He prided himself on his professionalism. Over 20 years in the job and not a single minute spent in a Changi jail cell. That wasn t an achievement in Singapore; that was a miracle. But then, Tiger had always been meticulous because he genuinely loved his job. When he left school in Toa Payoh and started drifting towards the teenage gangs around Chinatown, he was the one who always got away. And while the other kids just threw styrofoam cups of tea or splattered paint across the apartment, he was methodical. He would calculate how much tea or paint to use depending on how much money the gambler owed his boss. They were usually gamblers. Tiger preferred dealing with gamblers because they were invariably scrawny, weak Chinese guys who sobbed on their doorstep every week as he nailed a pig s head to their door and scrawled OWE MONEY, PAY MONEY across their bright, pastel-coloured apartment walls. The weak-minded imbeciles watched him vandalise their homes and did nothing. Some actually thanked him for not beating them up. He had no qualms about taking their money and still didn t, although he hadn t made an actual house visit for years. He employed his own teenage school dropouts to carry out his Ah Long jobs now. Tiger was an entrepreneur now. Like a productive Singaporean, he had dutifully upgraded his skills years ago.
Tiger had no issue with the job itself. The baseball bat routine was honed and polished years ago, and he recalled a similar job about a decade back when another S-League footballer required a lengthy spell on the injury list. The footballer was incapacitated, and Tiger was across the Causeway and into the Malaysian countryside before the traumatised security guard had a chance to react and pick up the telephone in his little box. Condo security guards were a joy to work with. Tiger didn t even have to bribe them anymore. He had to in the early days; his boss always insisted on it as they were mostly Singaporean then. But today s security guards were Indian or Bangladeshi guys earning 600 a month. They never wanted any aggravation. They never wanted to be interviewed by the authorities. They just wanted to keep their green cards . Globalisation had worked wonders for Tiger s business interests. Besides, Tiger knew that this Indian security guard would see nothing.
The difference with this particular job was, Tiger liked Chris Osborne. He was all right for a white man, a decent ang moh. Of course, Singapore had given him the tanned Malay girlfriend, the Orchard Road apartment and the odd TV appearance on the Super Soccer channel with his ang moh mates-all for playing in a shit football league. All of that was a given. But Chris was still relatively humble despite his modest success. There was something retained from Tiger s strict Chinese upbringing that made him look for that quality in another person. Tiger could still see Chris humility. Despite his wealth, Tiger still treated every gambler, punter, bookie s runner and prostitute exactly the same-with complete indifference. But he couldn t help himself; he liked Chris. Chris was everything that the middle-aged, plump, balding Tiger was not and yet modest about all of his attributes. And he could play, too. He could really play. Tiger hadn t bothered with local football since Singapore were booted out of the Malaysia Cup in 1994. The S-League made him a decent living and he attended the odd game for work purposes, where he would spend the entire 90 minutes organising bets over the phone. Until Chris came along. He danced around defenders in a way that reminded Tiger of those halcyon days of black and white portable TVs showing flickering images of Kevin Keegan and Trevor Brooking. Tiger particularly liked Brooking. He played in that unique, effortless fashion that only the true mavericks could master-Cantona, Zidane and even Le Tissier-showmen who were slower than their opponents, but always two steps ahead. Chris Osborne wasn t in their class, but he was in that category of entertainers and he came from the same world as Brooking, too. Tiger always liked that. Brooking was Tiger s favourite player