When will we learn? That is the question many punters will be asking themselves after tournament favourites South Africa were bundled out of the ICC Champions Trophy on the weekend.

It was another desperately disappointing performance by the team ranked no 1 in the world coming into the event and continues a stretch of fluffing their lines when they really need to deliver.

There is a small group of South Africans who will be pretty happy with our exit though and that is the bookmakers many of whom were standing the Proteas for rockets.

When the betting came out ahead of the first game patriotic punters flew into Graeme Smith and his men backing them at around the 3/1 mark and forcing their price in to around 2/1 in places ahead of the opener against Sri Lanka.

There were others like myself who having been burnt by this team too many times in semi-finals of major competitions thought they were being shrewd and helped themselves to the 15/10 about the Proteas to win their group. It appeared to be a match race with Sri Lanka and the Poms and Kiwi’s were all but written off as the price was clipped from 15/10 to as short as 11/10 before the off.

The bottom line is that there was some serious cash riding on the hosts in some form or another and an exit in the group stages would have been an outcome bookies could only have dreamt of.

Sitting back after the event it is easy to see how punters got carried away with the fact that we were playing at home and on our day could beat all comers but despite the odd mention of it as a minor concern the lack of match preparation that the side had leading into this event was largely ignored.

The rustiness was apparent from the word go though especially in the bowling department where we were plundered for close to 900 runs in 3 matches.

If there is a downside for the bookmakers it is perhaps that with the tournament hosts out of the mix there will probably be a general dip in public interest coupled with a fall in betting turnovers on the individual matches. As they count their cash garnered from patriotic punters I don’t think that will be giving them too many sleepless nights though!

This article first appeared in the Citizen CitiGaming section on Thursday 01 October 2009

Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and presents a sports betting radio show every Saturday morning at 07h30 on 1485AM Radio Today or Channel 169 of the DSTV Audio Bouquet.

You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/brentgraham or get on his mailing list by dropping him a line at brent@goodforthegame.co.za

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