By Mark Baber
July 26 – With English Premier League clubs in Hong Kong for its pre-season Asia Cup, Hong Kong Football Association chairman Brian Leung Hung-tak appealed to local authorities to relax betting rules to allow more top-quality matches into the market and boost the game in the country.
Leung’s call for new rules is driven by the potential financial benefits of allowing local betting on games between overseas teams in the city. This in itself would be controversial as staging games for betting purposes only would open the sport, already fighting a battle against match-fixers, to more ethical questions and potential corruption.
In Hong Kong all legal gambling is conducted through the non-profit Hong Kong Jockey Club and betting on local competitions is banned. Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Leung appealed for betting rules to be relaxed.
“There will definitely be huge interest in betting on these matches and I have spoken to the Jockey Club. Their initial response is quite positive as they can give us a very high percentage of the profit to help lower the cost of staging these matches. But since their existing operations do not allow betting on local competitions, it may require a change of the betting rules.”
The visit of the Premier League clubs for the Asian Cup this year has caused controversy. Nearly 36,000 fans braved torrential rain on Wednesday, to watch games between Tottenham and Sunderland and Manchester City and South China.
After heated debate between tournament organisers and the clubs’ officials, it was eventually decided both games would be played after a 30 minute delay and with only 40-minute halves. Unsurprisingly Spurs defender Jan Vertonghen was injured after jumping for a header and damaging his ankle as he landed. This lead to remarks from Tottenham manager that the game should never have been played.
However, in remarks at odds with those of Villas-Boas and Di Canio, Premier league chief executive Peter Scudamore argued that the pitch “was less than ideal and I can’t deny that. But there were almost 40,000 fans there wanting to watch the matches and the referee called it and decided it was safe. Therefore the games went ahead. At the end of the day it was about safety and at no time on Wednesday night was that pitch unsafe. It might not have been ideal, it might not have been pristine sometimes as we like to play, but it was perfectly playable.”
Furthermore, according to Scudamore, the condition of the Hong Kong Stadium pitch would certainly not affect the city’s chances of hosting the Asia Trophy in the future.
The Premier League boss also talked about the proposed extension to the season to include a round of matches overseas – a controversial ’39th game’ saying: “It was called the ‘international round’ and was never going to be the ’39th game’ in the chronological sense.
“Is it dead in the water? Certainly there are no plans to resurrect it. It was pretty savaged by the UK media and fan reaction in the UK wasn’t great.
“Will it probably happen? It will probably happen one day but that day probably won’t be on my watch.
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