Might Bite, by Patrick Foster with Will Macpherson, review: a deft study of gambling addiction – iNews

Patrick Fosters book begins at Slough station, where he is 500,000 in debt and steeling himself to jump under a train. Foster had been a compulsive gambler for 12 years and suicide seemed the only solution.

The gambling started in his late teens, at a point when his future looked very different. He was an up-and-coming cricketer with Northamptonshire County Cricket Club, as well as a full-time student at Durham University. But this enviable combination started to slip away when he entered a betting shop for the first time.

During that first visit he won a few hundred pounds and soon he was spending most of his spare time gambling. Fosters friends knew he liked a punt, but he concealed its growing extent from everyone. He found he could not maintain focus on his cricket and Northants let him go.

Fortunately, all was not lost not yet. He managed to graduate from Durham and get a job at Lloyds of London. Much less fortunately, he continued betting. Many bets were now online via his mobile phone. They were bigger. Using digital not physical money meant it flowed faster, he says.

Foster had the sense to realise that his City job and affluent London lifestyle were seriously accelerating his gambling. To reduce temptation, he took a job at a boarding school in Oxford. He was a good teacher, but even after this fresh start he could not curb his habit. In a scenario that could be straight from St Trinians, he approached parents to lend him money, inventing pretexts to conceal that the loans were to fund his gambling.n Shortly after, apprehensive of his lies being uncovered, he moved to another school.

Gambling is an overlooked addiction. Drugs and alcohol gain much more media attention, despite an estimated million problem gamblers in the UK Reading the minutiae of Fosters descent (recorded with the help of sports journalist Will Macpherson) is itself compulsive. There is a horrible fascination in finding out just how far he will go to feed his addiction, as his habit steadily shrinks his personality down to fit the dimensions of his smartphone screen.

Thankfully, Foster finally got lucky. He stepped back from the platform edge and stopped gambling with the support of his girlfriend and family. The debt charity StepChange consolidated his debts so that he can pay them off in instalments.

Even so, while reforms of gambling legislation are due soon, they will be challenging now that online gambling is so entrenched the perils of which this book charts so deftly, along with probing why professional sportspeople may be especially vulnerable. Cricket had given me such a rush, says Foster. The only thing that I could find that came close was gambling.

If you have been affected by any of the issues mentioned in this article, you can call the Samaritans free on 116 123.

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Might Bite, by Patrick Foster with Will Macpherson, review: a deft study of gambling addiction - iNews