By Will Sturgeon, 19 June 2002 11:00
NEWS Two days before the England football team's most important match in 12 years UK online bookie Sportingindex.com has suffered an embarrassing outage on its website. A holding page informs punters eager to place a bet on England's quarter final clash with Brazil that the site is down due to technical difficulties. A spokesman for the company said it should be back up sometime this morning. While such downtime is an occupational hazard for all online businesses the timing of this outage could not have come at a worse time. With favourites crashing out of the competition left, right and centre and a predicted £200m in bets expected during the competition it has so far been a very good competition for the bookies. England's progress and the fervour of patriotic punters will only have improved the situation, but also serves to highlight the problems which could result from losing your site - if only for a short while. Many punters will simply return later to place their bets, rather than go through the rigmarole of registering with another service, but with dozens of companies all competing for the same punter-pounds it will still be a cause for concern. In its favour Sportingindex.com offers high-risk, high-return, spread betting, while most other online bookies offer fixed odds betting. As such its faithful users will most probably wait for its return rather than change their betting habits altogether. The company's fixed odds service Sportingodds.com is still up and running as normal.
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