‘We were amazed to see the story in the papers’ – Arsenal message boards, match-fixing scandals and the Liverpool transfer report so bizarre an investigation was launched – FREE FIXED MATCHES, Soccer Predictions, Correct Score Tips, HT-FT Fixed Tips, Fixed Betting

Match Fixing

Of all the crazy transfer tales Liverpool have been involved in over the years, this takes some beating

Football fans are obsessed by transfers. After all, there is little more exciting than a new signing rocking up at your club.

No sooner has a player been linked with a side and the FIFA and Football Manager experts are out in full force, debating his abilities, social media is awash with supporters demanding signings and debating transfer fees and YouTube is littered with ‘Welcome to’ compilations which could make any player resemble a Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.

Liverpool ’s sole signing of the summer so far, Ibrahima Konate, was naturally given all such treatment throughout last season as links with the Reds emerged before Jurgen Klopp ’s side struck a £36m deal with RB Leipzig for the France Under-21s international.

Meanwhile, talk of Thiago Alcantara dominated Kopites’ minds throughout 2020 with his actual signing prompting euphoria and a chant for the Spaniard already compiled before the playmaker’s flight had even landed on Merseyside.

Such is the madness of 21st century football when you can dive into the darkest depths of any player’s career in the blink of an eye and watch any side’s match in any country with just the click of a button.

Match Fixing

But imagine a time before the launch of Twitter in 2006, YouTube’s unveiling in 2005 and even before Wikipedia’s first steps in 2001.

When Teletext was still a go-to news source for all the latest football news, scores and transfer rumours and when the gossip columns had the ability to set pulses racing with the turn of a page.

One reported Liverpool target managed just that back in November 1999, when the Reds were linked with another France Under-21s international, though a World Cup winning one at that too to already arouse suspicion at such a tale.

The player in question? Didier Baptiste.

Match Fixing

A reported £3.5m signing from Monaco, it didn’t matter that supporters didn’t recognise the name. Surely such a player for price was a steal.

Fans flocked to Liverpool’s official Clubcall line, which promised regular updates on the tale, paying 60p/min for confirmation they were being linked to such a player as Gerard Houllier sought to reinvent the Reds.

This was backpage news with the News of the World even carrying such a story, breaking the rumour in its “Soccer Secrets” column, with The Observer later reporting the same rumour before The Times even carried the tale as an exclusive, suggesting a £1m value on his head instead.

So how come you don’t remember the Frenchman running out for the Reds?

Did the move fall through or was he just another virtually unseen flop from French soil like Jean-Michel Ferri or Bernard Diomede?

Neither, in fact. There was one, rather big flaw, with this transfer rumour afterall.

Didier Baptiste isn’t real.

Match Fixing

The defender is a fictional character, played by actor Sacha Grunpeter, under the name Tom Redhill, who sadly passed away in a car accident in 2005, from former Sky One TV show ‘Dream Team’, chronicling the rollercoaster on-field and off-field fortunes of Harchester United across 10 seasons from 1997 before the show’s cancellation in 2007.

Sky announced earlier this week that Sky One is set to suffer the same fate as ‘Dream Team’ after 40 years on air, with Sky Showcase and Sky Max set to be launched in its place in September.

So, with Sky One’s demise in mind, let us look back to 1999 and one of their most infamous moments as their fiction bizarrely briefly merged with reality and Liverpool found themselves on the verge of ‘completing’ a £3.5m transfer that never was.

It all started when Harchester player-manager Luis Amor Rodriguez and assistant manager Ray Wyett, played by Scouse former Brookside and Holby City actor Mark Moraghan, looked to sign Baptiste on the show, having previously fictitiously worked together at Monaco.

When holding talks with the club, the defender told Harchester’s PR girl that he was aware of interest “from a big club managed by a Frenchman” in one episode, and when asked if he was bound for Merseyside and Houllier, or Arsenal and Arsene Wenger, Baptiste merely smiled a knowing smile.

That was enough for the rumour mill, or for an Arsenal fan forum message board at least.

Posted as a real-life transfer rumour by either a mischievous or confused Gunner, the speculation caught the eye of a journalist from the Hayters news agency, who wrote up the story for the News of the World newspaper.

“We were as amazed as anyone to see this story in the papers,” said a bemused spokesman for Dream Team once the reality of the situation became clear. “We can only assume someone saw the show and thought it was genuine.”

Meanwhile, the News of the World launched an investigation into how such a story ended up being produced and published on their pages in the first place.

So no Baptiste for Liverpool and they even missed out on him in the ‘Dream Team’ dimension too, with the defender indeed signing for Harchester.

And it was a lucky escape for Houllier’s fictitious Reds when you consider how the Frenchman’s Premier League career on the show panned out.

Falling out with Harchester caretaker manager Gordon Gallagher, Baptiste saw his hopes of being included in France’s squad for Euro 2000 seriously hindered, while an appearance from his estranged wife Victoria demanding a hefty divorce settlement saw him accept a bribe from interested club buyer Prashant Dattani to see that Harchester are relegated to aid his efforts to take over the club.

The Frenchman deliberately missed a penalty on the last day of the season, which would have seen Dattani’s efforts to relegate the club succeed, only for team-mate Rodriguez to score the rebound and keep the club up.

With us so far?

Wyett then takes over as manager but is left betrayed by his close-friend after finding out the truth about the match-fixing scandal as a local journalist stumbles across the truth and prompts an investigation from the FA.

Spiralling further into despair, Baptiste then took an overdose in disgust at his own actions, only to be saved by Wyett, before managing to quash the FA investigation by convincing them he was having an affair with Dattani in a storyline that really has not aged well 21 years later.

With his days at Harchester numbered as a result, the defender was then forced to join Marseille and never appears on Dream Team again.

From genuinely being linked with Liverpool to conspiring to relegate Harchester, it is impossible to decipher whether the fact or fiction is actually stranger in this incidence.

Still, thanks for one of the Reds’ most bizarre Premier League tales, Sky One.

Didier Baptiste, we never knew thee.

Source:

liverpoolecho.co.uk

FFM

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‘We were amazed to see the story in the papers’ – Arsenal message boards, match-fixing scandals and the Liverpool transfer report so bizarre an investigation was launched

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