Tennis appears to be in denial but match-fixing claims are not new

“I think it’s always disappointing when stories like this come out just before a big event, because it does detract,” said Chris Kermode, the ATP president, on the latest wave of match-fixing allegations to hit tennis on the eve of the season’s first Grand Slam in Melbourne.Well, it does rather. But far from being defensive, the authorities should be welcoming the match-fixing claims as the latest opportunity to prove they are getting to grips with a problem that some at the intersection of gambling, corruption, sport and money believe has been slipping from their grasp.Concerns about match-fixing in tennis are nothing new, particularly at the bottom end of the professional game where winning a tournament can barely cover expenses, but also involving players in the top 100 who regularly appear on confidential “watchlists” drawn up by the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU).Chris Eaton, the former FIFA security chief who is now part of Doha-based International Centre for Sport and Security, has said that tennis is the third-most targeted sport behind football and cricket.Other experts have said that if you were going to design a sport to fix you would come up with tennis or snooker because it is so hard in both cases to prove wrongdoing.The rapid growth of online betting on a vast swathe of matches, from the Futures tournaments on the very bottom rung of the professional ladder to Grand Slams, has left tennis vulnerable.One of the strongest allegations in the joint investigation by the BBC and BuzzFeed published on Sunday night was based on a nine-year-old report released in May 2008, which recommended that 28 players be investigated. Nothing was done because the authorities changed the rules and said they could not prosecute players investigated under the old ones.Anti-corruption expert Ben Gunn, one of two former British police officers commissioned to write the report, said he was not in a position to judge the effectiveness of the Tennis Integrity Unit since because its workings were so opaque.The report, written by Gunn and Jeff Rees (who became the first head of the TIU) was sparked by a notorious match between Russian Nikolay Davydenko and Argentinian Martín Vassallo Argüello in the Polish resort of Sopot in 2007. As chronicled at the time, the match attracted millions of pounds on the betting exchange Betfair for Argüello, ranked well below his rival, even as Davydenko raced into a one set to love lead before eventually retiring hurt.The report by Gunn and Rees recommended the creation of a new integrity unit to investigate the 28 cases listed and to proactively address the issue in future. As with doping crises in athletics and cycling, the fear is that the commercial impetus to protect the image and revenues of the sport (tennis in this case) has eaten away at the desire to tackle the problem at root, with integrity issues receding down the priority list.Tennis has particular issues around the ease with which players on the Futures and Challenger circuit could be corrupted. Unless it improves prize money and prospects there, temptation will always be at hand.If there is one lesson of the past year, as trust in football and athletics has been decimated by corruption scandals, it is that sports governing bodies must conduct their business in the light: the “never-apologise, never-explain approach” does not inspire confidence.