I'VE GOT MY WORK CUT OUT NOW
Mark Currie - Daily Post

WREXHAM defender Steve Evans admits he is playing catch-up in the competition for a start in the opening game of the new season at Darlington on Saturday.

Sidelined by injury for the best part of three weeks, the 28-year-old missed out on the Dragons' trip to Northern Ireland, where team-mates Shaun Pejic and Richard Hope staked their claims to begin the League Two campaign.

But last season's Player of the Year is hoping it won't be long before he is back in contention and said a run-out in tonight's reserve game at Buckley Town was an important step along the road to match fitness.

"Touch wood my ankle is okay now and I've been training without any problems," he said yesterday.

"I feel great and my fitness is not in doubt, but I need to get some match time under my belt and we'll see how it goes at Buckley.

"Assuming I come though that tomorrow it's then up to the gaffer to decide what he wants to do for Saturday, but it's obviously a disadvantage at this stage of things that I've not played alongside Hopey in any of the pre-season games.

"If I don't make the starting line-up at Darlington I'll be disappointed of course, but then it's up to me to keep myself fit, work as hard as I can in training and wait for my chance."

To add insult to injury, Evans believes he was ahead of the game in fitness terms because he was on international duty with Wales until the first weekend of June and had only three weeks holiday before the Wrexham squad reassembled after the summer break.

Still annoyed by the rash challenge in a friendly at Newtown that damaged his ankle ligaments, he added: "A stupid tackle put me out for three weeks at an important time in the pre-season.

"Up to that point everything had been going very well. I trained until June because of my Wales commitments and even during my short break I made sure I kept on top of my fitness.

"The enforced lay-off coming when it did was hardly the best preparation for the first game of a new season, but I've just got to get on with it."

Wales boss John Toshack is hosting a press conference on Monday to name his squad for the forthcoming friendly in Bulgaria and Evans, who won four caps last season, is keeping his fingers crossed for another call-up.

"Obviously I want to be part of the set-up because it's a great honour," he said. "I should certainly be available for selection, but I'm aware that the manager tends to pick players who are holding down a first-team place at their clubs.

"I'm reasonably fit anyway, it's just that match sharpness might be an issue so we'll have to wait and see."

Racecourse boss Brian Carey also includes Matt Crowell, Neil Taylor and Michael Carvill in his line-up at Globe Way this evening (7pm).

EVANS RETURNS
Gareth Bicknell - Daily Post

FORMER Wrexham ace Mickey Evans is back at the Racecourse as a regional scout

Evans, who stepped down as manager of Caersws this summer after guiding them since the League of Wales began in 1992, was part of Wrexham's famous 1977/8 Division Three championship winning team, and the side that reached the quarter-finals of the European Cup Winners Cup in 1976.

SLEAZE-RIDDEN? FOOTBALL CAN LAY FAIR CLAIM TO SMELL OF ROSES
Martin Samuel - The Times

To read some of the more foam-flecked previews to the new football season, lovers of our national sport could be forgiven for thinking that on Saturday, arriving at the local stadium at the appointed time, they will be greeted by a nefarious cast of characters pitched somewhere between Fagin, Moriarty and the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Pockets will be picked, evil unleashed and innocents dragged screaming to a fate unknown.

To listen to these pious sermons, sleaze, wickedness and corruption stalk our land, disguised as 22 men and a ball. This has been a summer of disgust and disgrace, infamy and injustice and many other adjectives with prefixes indicating negativity that fit tidily into headlines.

Still, it could be worse. We could be following tennis. Or cycling. Or motor racing. Or cricket. Or athletics. Is it only football that is dodgy? Do me a favour.

Arsenal are drawn to play Wrexham in the Cup, the fourth-best team from last season versus the 87th. For some bizarre reason, Wrexham are installed as favourites to win on the betting exchanges, with Arsenal a generous 11-8 against. Not right, is it? Then Arsenal go 1-0 up. Strangely, even more money is placed on Wrexham; so much, in fact, that the pot rises to ten times the usual amount attracted by a match of this nature. Yet, a goal up against inferior opposition, Arsenal continue to drift inexplicably in the market. And, somehow, they lose. They walk off before the final whistle, amid betting patterns so dubious that, for the first time in its history, the gambling exchange, Betfair, refuses to settle its wagers.

Imagine if that really happened. Imagine if football was struck by another scandal so spectacular that it involved household names and millions of pounds. It would be the lead item on every news bulletin all week, the front and back page of every newspaper, there would be editorials and inquests, public debates and quite possibly a book from Tom Bower. You know the drill.

Except that did happen. Not to Arsenal and Wrexham, but to Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo Arguello, fourth and 87th in the world tennis rankings, at the Poland Open in Sopot last week. Everything happened as explained except the acres of newsprint devoted to the fallout. Because it was tennis, you see. And given a luncheon vouchers scam at the Emirates Stadium and a smell like a hundredweight of rotting kielbasa emanating from centre court, any hack will tell you that the football is still the back-page lead.

The Davydenko whodunnit is not tennis's first, either. It is merely the most baffling. Davydenko, the No 1 seed, who, through any normal evaluation, would have been 1-5 with high street bookmakers, could be backed at 2.3-1 before his match with Arguello, and his price went out despite winning the first set 6-2. He lost the second set 6-3 and withdrew injured while losing the third 2-1. The total staked on this insignificant event was £3,590,595, more than double the pool on any other second-round match and as much as ten times greater than was placed on some others.

And where will we find this story? Tucked away in the depths of sports sections, barely recorded by columnists and commentators.

It is only football that is bent, you see. Tennis is a game for nice boys and decent young chaps with wealthy fathers. When £300,000 was bet on Richard Bloomfield, of Britain, defeating Carlos Berlocq, ranked 170 places higher, at Wimbledon in 2005 (and he did) there was never any question that information about an injury to Berlocq may have been illegally exploited.

Well, not according to Bill Babcock, grand-slam administrator for the International Tennis Federation. He said that there was not enough evidence to investigate this anomaly. Maybe the FA should have tried that one when Rio Ferdinand failed to attend a drugs test for UK Sport.

Remember Rio's missed test? Day after day, page after page of speculation, investigation, recrimination. He got away lightly, was the conclusion, despite an eight-month ban that prevented him playing in the 2004 European Championship. Even now, he is ridiculed for claiming that he simply forgot.

Yet who is this coming around the corner in a freshly pressed Great Britain tracksuit and on course for the 400 metres and 4 x 400 metres relay at the World Athletics Championships in Osaka? Why it is our old friend Christine Ohuruogu, fresh from a one-year ban for missing not one, not two, but three drugs tests, in a sport in which athletes are required to be available at all times. She forgot, too. Then she forgot again. And again. What a little scatterbrain.

Maybe she suffered the same memory loss that affected Michael Rasmussen, the Tour de France leader, when he said he had missed a test because of a training visit to Mexico, but had been allegedly spotted working in the Dolomites by Davide Cassani, the respected former road racer turned television commentator.

Alexandre Vinokourov was another forgetful soul on this year's Tour. He forgot that the blood a cyclist gives for analysis has to be his own. Vinokourov tested positive for a double population of red blood cells, a state consistent with a process called homologous transfusion, in which stored blood taken from another person is introduced intravenously. Now that is what you call third-party interference.

Yet when the Tour de France reached its conclusion in Paris last week, a trail of sulphur in its wake, there was nothing like the opprobrium reserved for football over the Carlos Tévez affair, a contractual issue that would have been resolved in one day had anyone at West Ham United had the wit to weigh the consequences of telling the truth against the cost of lying and being found out.

"It is among the most stirring sights in all sport and all the scandals of the past week could not change that," one observer wrote as the Tour made its way down the Rue de Rivoli. Football postTévez, however, is variously "morally bankrupt" (Daily Mail), "cowardly, negligent and self-interested" (Daily Telegraph), "pusillanimous" (Sunday Times) and "without honour" (Sunday Telegraph). Meanwhile: "For those watching from the lampposts, the railings and the balcony of the Hotel Crillon, it was poetry in motion," our man in Paris wrote. "No one could wish to put an end to this spectacle."

Which spectacle would this be? The one of the guy getting the blood transfusion? Or the one where his rival gets back to his room and has a heart attack, as eight cyclists did in just over a year up to February 2004?

Football has problems, but most fall into the category of skullduggery, not tragedy, and are the work of greedy businessmen, not doomed cheats and scientists. The Tévez affair has led to the game being cast as a dark art, but had the West Ham administration led by Terence Brown revealed the third-party agreement that existed with Kia Joorabchian it would have been initially rejected and then knocked into shape by Premier League lawyers, as frequently happens with foreign transfers. The registration would have gone ahead pending this agreement.

No big deal, in other words. Hiding the arrangement was wrong and the club were very lucky not to have been deducted points for lying, but as the case against it was heard by independent legal experts, not football people, it is hardly the sport that is responsible for the decision, however controversial. The same applies to the chaos surrounding Ken Bates and Leeds United. There have been few sanctions against the club taken in company law that are as draconian as the 25 points that have been deducted for crossing football's barriers, which suggests that the football world is considerably stricter than the business world, and it is the City that needs to get its house in order, not football.

We see what we want to see and, right now, the trend is to wish the national game to be castigated, just as it is to wish Lewis Hamilton, the greatly gifted Formula One driver, to be placed on a pedestal, which means drawing a veil over recent allegations of industrial espionage in the sport. Frankly, the idea that football has problems in excess of other sports is laughable in a year of cycling transfusions, £3.5 million tennis betting conundrums, Nigel Stepney and the troubling death of Bob Woolmer, the Pakistan coach, during cricket's World Cup.

Football is no better and no worse than the rest; it is just bigger and more popular, so its misdemeanours seem greater and receive wider exposure. Wigan Warriors are involved in a financial scandal in rugby league involving a world-record transfer fee: £450,000. There are footballers earning more than that in one month. Unsurprisingly, then, football has corruption issues affecting certain individuals that are consistent with an industry generating wealth in the hundreds of millions.

Despite this, each year it passes regulations that attempt to exert control. It is pointless asking why Thaksin Shinawatra, the Manchester City owner, did not fall foul of the Premier League's fit and proper persons test on human rights issues, when to fail him would represent a legal judgment in excess of any supported by the British Government.

This year, there are new laws introduced by the Premier League and FA that should avoid a repeat of the Tévez transgression and will also govern loan deals, particularly involving goalkeepers, and those infamous gentlemen's agreements.

It is not perfect, but it is a start. And it is certainly better than sitting back and smugly believing that there is only one sport out there that's a racket.