MONAGHAN UNITED chairman Jim McGlone says he is "disgusted" by suggestions his club's 5-1 win over Longford Town on Friday night might have been fixed. At least two major bookmaking firms have claimed they experienced significantly irregular patterns of betting on the game and the FAI has said it will speak to the companies before deciding whether an investigation is required, writes Emmet Malone

McGlone feels the allegations are a slur on the clubs involved. "I've no idea where any of this came from and I wouldn't know much about betting," he says, "but I find it a little bit disgusting anyone might suggest we've been involved in something like this. We've scored three goals here this afternoon," he said after yesterday's drawn game with Kildare County. "And we scored three against Wexford last week, that's 11 goals in three games so there's nothing hugely unusual about the other night, we're playing well at the moment, it's as simple as that."

Longford Town chairman Jim Hanley said the club would be vigorously following up the matter to establish if there had been any wrongdoing by anybody associated with the club. A small number of young players had, he said, been given starts in the game but, "as Vinny Perth made clear on Shannonside radio that's not unusual at this stage of the season when managers are looking to give players a chance to assess their ability.

"Nevertheless," he said, "we'll be contacting the FAI immediately to see what they can tell us about what is being said and to ask them to forward any information Paddy Power or any other bookmaking firm provides to them. We'll investigate it all thoroughly . . ."

There are reports of rumours in advance of the game that Longford would lose and two of the country's leading bookmakers have said they lost unexpectedly large amounts of money on the game. Paddy Power put their losses at about €30,000, some 20 times what they would normally expect to stump up on that sort of game, while Ladbrokes paid out almost the same figure.

"Normally on a game like this you'd expect to take a few hundred quid," says Donal McCarthy of Ladbrokes, "but we took around €10,000, split between Monaghan to win and Monaghan to lead at half-time (they did) and win at 11 to 4."

Interest in backing the straight win dried up, he says, when the odds shortened from 6 to 5 to 4 to 5 but, "it's fair to say that what went on was pretty unusual for a fairly low-profile First Division game. The alarm bells were ringing from pretty early on."

A spokesman for Boylesports said apart from the game being included in a surprising number of rather low-stakes accumulators they didn't see anything suspicious. "We saw them being put in with results," said Leon Blanche, "but we saw no particular irregularities in relation to that game."

The FAI has said it will discuss the situation with the firms before deciding whether they need to pursue the case. The association has an agreement with Betfair under which it can access the company's records in relation to a particular event where there is a suspicion of a problem like this arising.