Triumph and despair | Sport (original) (raw)

Former England footballer Tony Kay on his downward spiral after betting on his side to lose a crucial match

In 1962, I placed a £50 bet that my team, Sheffield Wednesday, would lose a match against Ipswich Town. We lost 2-0. When the bet was eventually discovered I was convicted for match fixing in 1965. I was fined £150, banned from playing football for life and sentenced to four months in prison. I served ten weeks.

Summing up my case the judge said, 'The police have investigated thoroughly and they cannot find another bet [that you have placed] on any other game.' But I was still convicted of conspiracy to fix football matches. I was an England international at the time, but, along with my team-mates Peter Swan and David Layne, who were also found guilty, I lost everything.

Layne approached me before the Ipswich game and said, 'What do you reckon today?' I said, 'Well, we've never won down here [Portman Road].' He said: 'Give me £50 and I'll get you twice your money.' I thought that was a good deal.

The story of my bet eventually came out after I was transferred to Everton. I was in a Liverpool nightclub one Saturday night [in 1964] and a friend said to me: 'You're all over the front page of the Sunday People about the Ipswich game. They're saying you bet on the match and the bookmakers have been screaming because they lost £35,000 that week.'

I felt awful. This wasn't what I was about. All I wanted to do was play football. It was all down to a former player called Jimmy Gauld, who had been gambling for years, apparently. I think that he wanted to sell his story for one last payday.

There had been rumours for ages about match fixing in football, but noone had ever proved it. Gauld knew Layne, who had been at Mansfield and who before the Ipswich match had acted as the go-between. I had never met Gauld but then one day he turned up at my house in Liverpool and introduced himself as a friend of David Layne's. He said that he wanted to speak to me, so we went and sat in his car outside my house. He began to fire questions at me, trying to confuse me. He asked if I'd accepted money for fixing a game. I said: 'I don't know what you're talking about.' I didn't realise that he was recording our conversation.

The tape of our conversation was used in court as evidence against me. It was one of the first times that this had ever happened. But even though the tape was incoherent and you could hear nothing, it still stood up.

In the end, Jimmy Gauld received four years, because he had been fixing matches on an organised basis. Before the case we spent a week in prison in Nottingham. The whole place stank. There were about 12 other players there and that's when I realised there was something organised going on. Some of the players were from Mansfield Town, which was Gauld and Layne's old club.

I did my time in an open prison near Leeds. At first the other inmates called me a cheat but the governor, a committed Leeds fan, was good to me. Then, not long after my release, the Kray twins contacted me through a spiv they knew in Sheffield called Willy Phelps who used to sell tickets. The Krays wanted me to go down to London to tell them about the new procedure with taped evidence. Phelps said: 'Here's a first class ticket to London, Tony. They'll put you up, stay with Russian somebody or other and his wife.' I said: 'I'm not going down there.' But in the end I didn't dare refuse.

I went to London and the ginger haired one [Charlie Kray], who is now dead, took me to the Krays' pub and I told them all about it. I was even invited out for a night on the town with the Krays.

My problem was how to survive without football; it was so difficult. I eventually ended up living in Spain for 12 years, initially because I sold a diamond that turned out to be fake. I went to see my dad in Sheffield, picked up the News of the World, and it said that the police were looking for Tony Kay in connection with a fake diamond ring. I said to the woman I was with: 'Drive me down to the airport, now!'

I took the first flight out to Barcelona. From there, I went to Seville, and ended up spending the winter in Benidorm, where I continued to play football. Clubs like Liverpool, Arsenal and Nottingham Forest would come on tour and we'd beat them all because they'd go out on the drink and we'd play them at three o'clock in the afternoon when it was too hot.

I was eventually arrested four years later for the ring business after I sneaked back to Sheffield to see friends. I spent a weekend in the cells, and was fined £400.

Jimmy Greaves once said that he had stopped playing too early. I understand what he means. I loved playing football; it was all I knew, and all I wanted to do.

One of my happiest experiences was when I returned last year to Everton, to Goodison Park, for the club's centenary celebrations. I played 44 games for Everton when they won the league title, in 1962/3, and when I returned that day, walking out on to the pitch, I received an incredible ovation from the fans. The warmth of their reception meant everything to me, not least because I hadn't been back to Everton for years and yet they still remembered me.

Do I regret placing that bet? Well, I think I was harshly punished. I won only £150 from the bet, but my whole career was destroyed. They took away the game I loved and I have never really recovered from that.

The life facts

Tony Kay was born in Sheffield on 13 May 1937 and began his career at Sheffield Wednesday, the team he supported as a boy. While at Wednesday, he and two team-mates placed a bet on a match against Ipswich, which eventually led to jail terms and life bans from the game. Kay became Britain's most expensive footballer when he moved to Everton in 1962 for £60,000. Capped once by England, he now lives in south London.