Famous games of dice: a new history. Part 4 in a series.
There may be no better explanation for the disaster that presently threatens much beloved Portsmouth Football Club than a series of dice games which has seen five owners in three seasons and a fall from grace that is even now approaching terminal velocity. I posit that it began when Serbo-Croat Silicon Valley tycoon Milan Mandaric, who had rescued the club from oblivion in the late 90s and taken them to a reasonable standing in the English Premier League, then lost the club in a game of dice to Russio-Israeli arms dealer Arkady Gaydamak. Being proscribed from operating in Britain due to a French international arrest warrant, Arkady passed the club to son Sasha, the former Israeli sniper who saddled the club with inordinate amounts of debt – apparently to himself – before losing it in a game of dice to the world’s only broke Saudi billionaire Suleiman Al Fahim. Al Fahim lost a game of dice – and the club – to the world’s only non-existent Saudi billionaire Ali Al Faraj – or Al Mirage as he is known in Portsmouth. Al Faraj lost the club in a game of dice to the world’s only broke Hong Kong banker Balram Chanrai who reportedly was owed a fortune by various previous owners of the club, and owed them a fortune in return. All of which meant, like the global economy, everybody seemed to be in debt to everybody, and nobody had any money, but the ones at the top, who owed the most, and were owed the most, had the most while the the rest lost their jobs.
Chanrai, after putting the club into administration, won a game of dice against the British Taxman and avoided a huge tax bill that nobody could agree on who’s watch it had accumulated. Chanrai also won a game of dice against the world’s only broke Russio-Lithuanian billionaire banker Vladimir Antonov and by winning, was entitled to give the club to Antonov and let him worry about who owes what to whom. During his period of worry, Antonov emptied out the banks that he owned only for the authorities to discover that there wasn’t any money in them in the first place. Another game of dice against the taxman is now being scheduled. Chanrai may end up losing out by winning back the club he tried so hard to lose when he lent it money and was then unable to pay himself back.
All this begs the question, how have so many dubious dice-playing broke billionaires been allowed to destroy a famous old football club? Which is explained by a most famous game of dice called the Football Association’s Fit and Proper Person’s Test, in which they seek to find out if a prospective owner is fit and proper, by playing a game of dice which is always loaded against the club. Are you still following me?
