Search

Former billiard hall owner John Stansfield feels that the guts would be torn out of snooker if it is found that an Embassy World Snooker Championship match between Jimmy White and Peter Francisco was fixed. Bookmakers began having doubts about the match because of the amount of money being waged on a 10-2 victory for White. Editor of football weekly When Saturday Comes, Andy Lions, says that spectators' perception of football will be fundamentally undermined if the Bruce Grobbelaar bribery allegations are proved. Sports fans find it hard to contemplate that players are not totally committed to victory.

Amateur golfer John Buckingham's libel suit against two fellow members of the Sherwood Forest Golf Glub, England, who had refused to apologise for accusing him of cheating, has highlighted the importance of absolute honesty in golf, a game where players are their own referees. Reg Dove and Graham Rusk had made separate allegations of cheating against Buckingham which were found not proven by the golf club's committee. However a jury subsequently found against Buckingham on the basis that Dove and Rusk had not acted maliciously, leaving him with a possible legal bill of 250,000 pounds sterling.

Cheating and bad behaviour in sport is not necessarily more prevalent than in the past, but drug-taking scandals and the behaviour of sports stars have been brought out into the open. The Sports Council has no hesitation about naming the sports where drug testing is less transparent than it should be. Television has turned sports stars into personalities and public interest in their behaviour has increased accordingly. Sports psychologist Simon Davies believes that the professionalisation of sport creates problems for sports people in that sport becomes part of their personality.

The British love fair play in sport, but some forms of cheating, such as 'tampering' with the ball in cricket, provoke far less outrage than others, such as drug-taking in athletics. Cheating is not unusual in sport, but neither are signs of good sportsmanship. Players in the 1994 football World Cup routinely helped other players up after collisions. Francesco Panetta put his own ambitions aside to help fellow Italian Alessandra Lambruschini to his feet after the latter fell during the 3,000 metres steeplechase at the 1994 European athletics championships.

Pakistani cricketer Sarfraz Nawaz withdrew his action for damages against Northamptonshire captain Allan Lamb after four days at the High Court in London, England. Sarfraz said that Lamb's acknowledgement that Sarfraz had played within the rules of cricket and had not cheated in the games he played with Lamb, was sufficient for him to drop the action. Lamb meanwhile stood by his Aug 1992 claims in the Daily Mirror that Sarfraz had shown him how to doctor the ball when they were team-mates at Northamptonshire. Lamb claimed that the doctoring technique had been shown to the 1992 Pakistani tourists.