There are dozens of bent matches at the highest level of the Italian game every single year. It's not obscure conspiracy theory, it's absolute fact. All you have to do is look at the amount of games in Italy which have started with draw prices being odds on, like 4/6 the draw in the last year alone - and then you watch the game and it is absolutely hilarious watching them pretend that they are trying to win the game. I was looking at a game a few weeks ago in which the home team were winning 1-0 with 15 minutes to go and the draw price was 1/3 - no prizes for guessing which way that game finished.
I remember a match in one of the smaller European leagues a few weeks back. They have a split in this league after the teams have played each other 3 times: the top half and bottom half break away from each other to form 2 separate mini-leagues. Anyway, the team which was winning the league had a game in hand against a team which hadn't been good enough to make the top league. Then a very strange thing happened. The 'crap' team beat the champions-elect. And not due to a jammy goal or some heroics by their goalkeeper either. They dominated the 'better' team from start to finished. They absolutely slaughtered them. They pissed all over them. It was men against bhoys. Who's to say that there wasn't some dodgy match fixing going on in this game? I think we should be told.
As a rule of thumb, the shortest price a draw ever gets in ANY football match is about 9/4. Look at your fixed odds coupon sometime. In the past couple of weeks there have been 2 games I can think of in Italy that were 'odds on' the draw pre-match. This price is unthinkable in normal betting. Guess what - both games were draws. You could put your mortgage on at 10/11 if you dared.
