Maybe Liverpool’s 8-0 Victory WAS Too Good To Be True!

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The Daily Mail is scuttling over to each and every one of its readers and eagerly reporting that of all the dodgy European match-ups that could be looked at, the Liverpool-Bestiktas 8-0 goal orgy is raising eyebrows for irregular betting patterns. Hmmm.

Daily Mail journos tell us that UEFA’s director of communications, William Gaillard, stated yesterday that only the InterToto Cup game between Makedonija and Cherno More was officially being looked at and that other matches were merely ‘suspicious’ because of dodgy betting patterns. Gaillard said:

“At this stage I can neither confirm nor deny the reports. There has to be a certain amount of confidentiality with these things because we could risk a source of information drying up.”

The Daily Mail highlights the fact that Liverpool’s Champions League group is very weird indeed, with Besiktas having a rotten goal difference of minus nine and Liverpool having a goal difference of plus nine, but that the Turks can still leapfrog Liverpool and qualify from the group. Hmmm.

The Daily Mail’s trump card however, is that:

“Investigators for Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich daily, claim that there was ‘frenzied betting on a high-score victory’ prior to the game. UEFA have made no contact with Liverpool and last night officials at Anfield said they could not comment because they had no knowledge of any controversy. But reports in Germany suggest that Besiktas players, on a fraction of the salaries earned by Liverpool stars, could have been targeted by Asian betting syndicates.”

So was Liverpool’s glorious result really too good to be true?