All for the greater good

Chelsea must face up to the uncomfortable paradox that while they should be in the Champions League final, there will be precious few bemoaning their absence from European football’s showpiece event, argues Liam Mackey.

MY OLD mate, the author and journalist Declan Lynch, has just published his latest book, Free Money, and it is with a complete absence of bias and a surfeit of envy that I can warmly recommend it to all those who are not of a nervous disposition.

The product of a life-time’s research and a year’s intensive hot-housing, it plunges the reader into the frenetic world of on-line betting, pausing every now and then for some reflective, hilarious and invariably painfully earned wisdom on the roles of addiction, delusion, sheer bad luck and the baleful role of the gods in relentlessly screwing up humanity’s eternal quest to master its own destiny.