LOOK SHARPE: Wat’s Going On?

Sports betting PR legend GRAHAM SHARPE brings you his latest ‘LOOK SHARPE’ column…

I HAVE something of a shared history with Watford FC’s Vicarage Road ground. Being a long-term supporter of that club’s greatest ‘rivals’, Luton Town, I was never very keen to go anywhere near the place, despite living just a couple of miles down the road.

I was also a director at nearby then-non-league Wealdstone FC, who are now members of the National League, albeit as I write, being stuck in one of the four relegation places from that division – but who were a couple of divisions lower than that when they suddenly found themselves without a ground back in the day – after the former owners legged it, leaving the club on the verge of extinction.

The former owners had not left much for we new directors to work with but we somehow cobbled together a deal allowing us to share the facilities of Vicarage Road – albeit we hadn’t noticed we would apparently also be liable for half of Watford’s costs.

Anyway, that’s all another story, this one takes place even earlier in the Vicarage Road story, in the mid-seventies, when the ground was also hosting a greyhound track, the commentaries of whose races were broadcast nationwide into betting shops for punters to place bets on.

A man called Heinz Kuhl had come up with what he believed to be a cunning plan to beat the bookies in 1976. He stationed himself at the ground/track, in a position from where he was able to signal the imminent outcome of the race just being run, to accomplice Maria Lawrence, immediately as the dogs passed the winning line. Her job was to rush into her local betting shop and slap down her bet before the ‘off time’ would have been notified, as there was a delay before such info could be transmitted.

They rehearsed, then went for it for real. Kuhl watched the race, signalled to Lawrence, who dashed into the shop, selecting the appropriate pre-prepared betting slip, which was duly accepted. A doddle. Job done. Only it wasn’t, Kuhl had signalled the wrong winning number. D’oh!

They tried again – however, this time, their cunning plan had been rumbled and the bungling pair from Shephers’s Bush were nabbed in the act and sent to court – where they were fined for ‘conspiracy to defraud.’

Perhaps aware of the drawbacks of this ploy, four members of a gang based in the Watford area then tried a different method, utilising walkie-talkie radio links to swindle the local bookies of £250. However, they were arrested and prosecuted, with lawyer Michael Wilkinson explaining how the fraud, also based on races at Watford, had worked – or not!

As the race finished, the gang member would shin over the fence and would shout the name of the winner to another man in a nearby phone box, who would in turn phone the result to yet another gang member in a phone box near a bookies in London.

That man would be using a walkie-talkie radio to pass the message on to a fourth gang member already inside a betting shop, who would have his walkie-talkie hidden under his clothes, with an earpiece hidden by a wooly hat. As soon as the number came through he’d fill in the betting slip and hand it over the counter.

The whole operation took within a minute of the dogs crossing the winning line.

However, someone had blabbed and the cops were filming the operation in progress to, er, trap those involved and duly broke up the plot.

Must have been difficult to find a free phone box in Watford back then!

From bookies to books – and not in Watford, but in Waterford, in June, 2007 word went round that a mystery local benefactor had spent £20,000 hiding scratchcards between the pages of various volumes of the 70,000 contained in the local library.

Readers and treasure hunters began descending on the place with some of the books yielding up to ten scratchcards hidden between the pages – the majority of them being biographies. Lucky finders won up to £200.

‘It was like a flock of locusts descending on us’ declared chief librarian, Richard Fennessy, ‘The library is now an absolute mess – we have no idea who did this.’

Finally, as I wrote this piece, the US Presidential Election was drawing very close – which reminded me that during the 1992 US Presidential Election campaign, I had received a phone call from a man claiming to be a Texan, who told me he wished to place ‘a small bet’ on Bill Clinton coming out on top.

‘Just how small is this bet?’ I asked him.

‘Three million dollars’ he drawled.

‘I’m sorry that’s a little too rich even for our book, I’m afraid – anyway, you should surely be grateful to have that sort of money in the fvirst place, let alone looking to gamble it all on an event you can’t really have any inside information about.’

‘Hell, no, man – it ain’t all mine – there’s THREE of us in this together………….’

Hope he managed to get on somewhere, though!

Views of authors do not necessarily represent views of Star Sports Bookmakers.