RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: A rapid verdict is needed over Paqueta's bookings

RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Sport is a huge waste of time if we can’t believe what we’re seeing. And that’s why we must have rapid verdict in strange case of Paqueta’s three bookings

• Lucas Paqueta is the subject of a probe into potential betting breaches he denies
• A rapid decision is needed but similar investigations have taken time to conclude
• WATCH: It’s All Coming Up – Mail Sport’s preview show for the weekend’s football

Like most places, they love their heroes in Rio de Janeiro. And it can be an intense sort of affection. I witnessed it once when I offended the folk of Niteroi, a suburb which sits on Guanabara Bay and is one of the nearest points of land to Paqueta Island. About 10km by boat.

If you’ll indulge the tale, it was the thick end of two decades ago and I found myself travelling with a yacht race, which one day necessitated the writing of a story about the great Brazilian sailor Torben Grael. He’s a good man and a top athlete — a five-time Olympic medallist, the star of Niteroi, and one of his brothers is now the mayor there.

Anyway, the piece was vaguely critical about his response to a pressurised situation and so the emails started. There were a couple of hundred before long and eventually there was a message from a friend, who was working for Grael: ‘Probably don’t go to Niteroi for 20 years.’

With the sentence nearly up, and so too this tangent, thoughts drift back to Guanabara Bay and the idea that some of the 4,000 residents of Paqueta Island took a dimmer view of the temperament of their most famous son, Lucas Tolentino Coelho de Lima. Lucas Paqueta of West Ham, to most of us.

But maybe they knew something, which is the mystery at the heart of one of the more jolting stories to emerge from the opening weeks of the Premier League season. How much did those punters know? Because so far we have learned from reporting in Mail Sport that a number of bets have been traced to that tiny island, half a square mile in size, and the people placing them were able to pinpoint with some accuracy when this midfielder might be shown a yellow card.

Bets placed on Lucas Paqueta to be booked against Aston Villa were made on Paqueta island 

A yellow card Paqueta received for a foul on Aston Villa’s John McGinn in March is one of three bookings under scrutiny in FA probe due to suspicious betting activity

Paqueta plays for a club sponsored by Betway, whose logo features on West Ham’s shirt and on advertising boards at the London Stadium

Your browser does not support iframes.

The details are worth recapping, as is Paqueta’s denial of wrongdoing, because it is all quite extraordinary. At the centre of the matter is the suspicious betting activity around three West Ham fixtures in the past five months — Aston Villa at home on March 12, Leeds at home on May 21 and then Bournemouth away, on the first matchday of this season.

To go back through those games is to see Paqueta booked for a swipe from behind on John McGinn as he led a breakaway for Villa, likewise for a clumsy trip on Crysencio Summerville of Leeds, and again in the Bournemouth match, when he jumped to meet a goal-kick in stoppage time and handled the ball.

We don’t know exactly how much was gambled, but some who made the bets are reported to be familiar to Paqueta and the sums were enough to arouse the attentions of bookmakers. According to my colleague Kieran Gill, who broke the story, the amount placed in one instance was sufficient for a bookie to slash Paqueta to odds-on for a yellow card ahead of the kick-off.

If there is a familiar irony in all of this, it is that Paqueta plays for a club sponsored by Betway. He wears their name on his shirt. He wore their name in those three games. And it was Betway, interestingly, who were responsible for flagging the betting patterns to the International Betting Integrity Association, which in turn delivered the issue to FIFA and from them it found its way to the Football Association.

We have learned that an FA investigation has been running for five months, dating back to that tackle on McGinn and in the mess Paqueta has seen a transfer to Manchester City fall through. Crucially, though, he is still playing and you could get 7-5 with Bet365 on him getting a card at Brighton on Saturday.

We have been here in the recent past with Ivan Toney, of course, albeit only in the broadest sense, because even at this early stage, the Paqueta episode has the potential to be far more serious. As a gambling addict, Toney wagered on all sorts within his 232 breaches of the rules and 13 times he bet on his own club to lose. But not in any games he was playing.

And that is a vital distinction here — he wasn’t adversely shaping an outcome. It was an integrity issue and clearly serious but not at the deepest end of the pool. The Paqueta case has the scope to go to darker places, because if he is found to have been directly involved in these bets, then it would be a conversation about spot-fixing. That would be the deep end. It would be a relative of what we saw when the Pakistan cricket team toured here in 2010 and started flinging no-balls.

We aren’t there with Paqueta. There is no charge, no verdict, and he is free to play. So for the time being all we have are suspicious betting patterns and an investigation, which is territory football has visited before — in May, Granit Xhaka was finally cleared of involvement in a betting scam after £52,000 was placed on him being booked in a game way back in December 2021.

Punters could still place bets on the midfielder to be booked against Brighton despite the ongoing investigation by the FA

Former Arsenal star Granit Xhaka was cleared of any involvement in a possible betting scam in May but the investigation took around 17 months to reach a final conclusion

Ivan Toney scored 10 goals worth 19 points to Brentford in the six months after he was charged

That was about 17 months from door to door, so even longer than the more-publicised Toney saga, which also ended in May.

It is thought the broader investigation into the latter’s circumstances went back to around April 2022, meaning it took over a year to have a hearing and rubberstamp a verdict. In the six months between his charge and the issuing of his ban, Toney would score 10 goals worth 19 points to Brentford, and that might trigger a question given these are enquiries about integrity and the inferences they contain: is there no faster way?

It is a sentiment that chimes far louder in today’s subject matter with Paqueta. It simply cannot become another judicial glacier that shifts an inch or less with each passing month.

I am conflicted on the wisdom of a temporary suspension pending an outcome, unless there is already evidence beyond our knowledge that has been acquired and leans in that direction. But simultaneously, sport is a monumental waste of time if you cannot believe what you are seeing. That’s what the dopers brought to athletics, boxing and cycling. And it’s what cases like this can bring too.

Paqueta will be under a cloud until it is resolved and it is to the detriment of all parties, the player included, if it becomes one of those issues that is allowed to linger indefinitely. Alas, it is odds on that I’ll be cleared to return to Niteroi before the full truth is established about what happened on a neighbouring island.

Spanish football must kiss goodbye to Rubiales

It started with a kiss and goodness knows where it will end. If the powerbrokers of Spanish football have any sense, or at least half the competency of the women in their national team, this victory lap in the wake of their World Cup win will culminate in the launching of Luis Rubiales from his throne.

Grabbing his crotch next to royalty, planting creepy kisses that weren’t wanted on his players and the cartoonish ravings of a press conference where he chanted over and again that he will not resign — has there been a more luminous and ludicrous example of turning triumph into disaster?

At last count 81 women from the Spanish footballing ecosystem say they will not play until this guy has left his role. The response of his federation has been the initiation of legal action against Jenni Hermoso for saying she did not consent to the kiss and it raises one question among many others that are more important: how good would that team be if they weren’t limited by so many fools in suits, from the manager many of them loathe, to the president who fell in love with the buffoon in the mirror?

Spanish FA president Luis Rubiales declared during a press conference on Friday that he will not reign, but has since been provisionally suspended from his role by FIFA

IT’S ALL KICKING OFF! 

It’s All Kicking Off is an exciting new podcast from Mail Sport that promises a different take on Premier League football.

It is available on MailOnline, Mail+, YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify.

Your browser does not support iframes.

Source: Read Full Article