Satellite giants BSkyB have been warned that they have to let go of their stranglehold on the Premiership TV rights and share with their rivals if they don’t want an expensive battle with the regulators. BSkyB is initially accused of keeping down competition by limiting distribution to Premiership games.
Kevin Pietersen faces the first real examination of his captaincy credentials in the forthcoming jaunt to India and I believe cricket betting enthusiasts will join me in an unusually optimistic expectation of the outcome. He certainly achieved immediate results in the One Day International (ODI) series against South Africa, but that was a team resting on the laurels of their domination of the test match series and unfocused on the lesser ODI element of their tour. India will put up a fight.
It’s been a campaign of ups and downs for Barack Obama in what was originally expected to be an easy stroll to the White house for the first black presidential nominee from either of the two main political parties. For a start, online political betting enthusiasts have been baffled by the apparent ease with which women voters can switch their allegiance from Hilary Clinton to John McCain seemingly just to express their irritation for the rejection, in the primaries, of their female delegate. Can you imagine a female Labour Party supporter voting for Cameron because she didn’t get her first choice of parliamentary candidate?
They say ‘Pride comes before a fall’, well in Amir Khan’s case, it was the stinging left hook of Columbian, Breidis Prescott. And now just after one fight Khan has sacked his trainer Jorge Rubio. It all smacks of desperation, somehow. The trainer has been made the fall-guy, but there must be others accountable.
Today the broadsheets are full of comment from leading sports legal experts about the West Ham/Tevez ruling that the club broke the Premier League rules in the transfer of Carlos Tevez from his Brazilian club two years ago. Premier League betting fans might have noticed that most are keen to condemn the verdict of the independent tribunal. They complain that the ruling has created a precedent which will lead to all kinds of future actions. They are also concerned that the relegation battle was taken from the pitch to the courtroom.
Another weekend has passed and more controversial decisions involving the match officials who referee our beloved game of football. This time is was Watford versus Reading in a Championship League game. In what can only be termed as ‘farcical’, Reading were awarded a goal when the ball had went out for a goal kick instead of between the goal posts by linesman, Nigel Bannister. Bannister later admitted that it was an ‘optical illusion‘ that made him signal that a goal had been scored.
It was make or break time for Nick Faldo at Valhalla over the last three days. Come to that, it was make or break time for the competition itself, in many ways. For golf betting fans, repetitive wins by the Europeans had taken the excitement out of a contest previously noted for its nail-biting close finishes. Further decline was signalled by the word going around that the Americans were beginning to see the Ryder Cup competition as an irrelevance; a distraction from the more important imperative of making lots of money on the Tour. A case of sour grapes, it would seem.
So, it’s back. For the next fourteen weeks about twelve million viewers will tune into the new series of the immensely successful show, ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. You want to think it’s popularity is a peculiarity of the British mind, like pantomimes, an eccentricity viewed by the rest of the bemused world, as another inexplicable but harmless quirk of our unique culture. But it’s exported over all the world and is just as popular wherever it’s shown. There are just some things that defy explanation.
With only 4 Grand Prix meeting left and a single point the difference between Lewis Hamilton (78) and Felipe Massa (77) the championship race could be the closest contested it has been for years, which will thrill Formula 1 betting fans. Much debate has started at just how much the weather will play a part in this years championship. The 4 remaining stages of the championship are at Singapore, Japan, China and Brazil which are entering into their rainy seasons.
The 37th Ryder Cup gets under way at Valhalla GC in Kentucky this coming Friday and golf betting fans the world over will be digging in for three days of fiercely intense competition yielding a level of excitement on a par with the FIFA World Cup. In charge of the European team is Nick Faldo, a player of exceptional talent but a person many believe would not be a good team leader. Over the years, golf fans have been aware of his unpopularity among players, his odd, very personal, sense of humour and his capacity to utter remarks about others that are usually ill-judged and often unkind.
