'Match Fixer takes place inside the murky underbelly of Asian Football. The so-called squeaky clean city-state of Singapore plays host to betting syndicates which have for decades fed off the insatiable illegal gambling habits of the local population and in the process made a select few bookies very rich and far too powerful.
'Neil Humpreys, a former Football correspondent for the national Singapore press, lifts the lid off a previously unexplored - but very real - subject. In his debut novel,corruption is destroying the Beautiful Game in Asia and has spread its tentacles into the UK via spread betting cartels that have already knocked out floodlights and caused chaos in the English Premier League.
'Against such a background, former West Ham United apprentice striker Chris Osborne arrives in Singapore for a final roll of the dice to get his once promising career back on track. However not even a boyhood spent growing up in the East End prepares him for the crooked shenanigans, bloated former British footballing jetsam and the underground party drugs scene that welcomes him to life in paradise.' (From the publisher's website.)
'The creative writing thematising soccer in Australia, Australian soccer literature, is a marginal literary genre, though it is not as marginal as many critics and discussions would have it. Drawing on materials spanning from the late nineteenth century until the present, this paper examines the diversity of themes and sources found in Australian soccer literature. It attempts to establish a historical narrative based upon the extant texts, and in this context the paper unearths long-forgotten passages, often hidden within larger texts dealing with other issues. In short, this paper adds to the threadbare coverage of Australian soccer literature in the fields of Australian literature dealing with sport, as well to bibliographical listings found in critical works dealing with Australian soccer. While noting the apparent isolation between the various works of Australian soccer literature, this paper also notes the broader trends that the majority of the works contribute to.'
Source: Article abstract.
'The creative writing thematising soccer in Australia, Australian soccer literature, is a marginal literary genre, though it is not as marginal as many critics and discussions would have it. Drawing on materials spanning from the late nineteenth century until the present, this paper examines the diversity of themes and sources found in Australian soccer literature. It attempts to establish a historical narrative based upon the extant texts, and in this context the paper unearths long-forgotten passages, often hidden within larger texts dealing with other issues. In short, this paper adds to the threadbare coverage of Australian soccer literature in the fields of Australian literature dealing with sport, as well to bibliographical listings found in critical works dealing with Australian soccer. While noting the apparent isolation between the various works of Australian soccer literature, this paper also notes the broader trends that the majority of the works contribute to.'
Source: Article abstract.