Bookies should paws for thought over Tiger-gate

When I used to play Sunday morning football my mate Wils and I used to make a point of stopping at the corner shop near the ground to buy a bottle of Lucozade and a packet of crisps – which of course is any self-respecting athlete’s pre-match meal of choice. Invariably, we would also grab a copy of the News Of The World, say “Who’s career are they destroying today?” and avidly hover up the lurid details, as well as our crisps, before losing 4-1 to the meat-cleaving hod-carriers of SW17.

In said rag, there would without fail be some celebrity being publicly humiliated as the result of some honeytrap or other, cunningly devised in the editorial offices of tabloid scribes who for some reason call themselves investigative journalists. Great lengths were gone to dupe Sven-Goran Eriksson into expressing an interest in managing Aston Villa when he should have been preparing England for the World Cup, while the model Sophie Anderton did little for her aspiring TV career when agreeing to a weekend of sex in the Bahamas for £15,000 while snorting cocaine in a hotel room with the same ‘Fake Sheikh’.

When I say the newspaper went to great lengths to catch these people off guard, all it actually took was a dark-skinned reporter, some sunglasses, a well-placed head towel, a dodgy accent and a hidden video camera to reveal these scoops.