If you want to be a winning punter, then knowing something that the bookmaker doesn’t is a helpful ingredient. There were clearly a few people with a little inside knowledge last week about the Melbourne’s Storm’s salary cap problems.

Backing the team that is favourite to win a competition to finish last instead of first, for large amounts of money, is not an everyday occurrence and it did not take the bookies long to realise that something was up.

As much as they might not like it, dealing with such insider trading is an occupational hazard although there will be grumbles that the knowledge this time must have come from inside, or close to inside, a highly reputable company such as News Corporation, which owned the club being investigated and half-owned the one doing the investigating.

Security of information was clearly not a strong point and it would be fun to know the names of those who profited, although bookmakers normally are great respecters of such private matters so we will probably never know.

Having a bet with inside knowledge, after all, is not considered to be in the same league as profiting from a similar insight with a purchase or two on the stock exchange.

What we can all have a giggle about is the righteous indignation that News is reacting to at suggestions that it should at least have had suspicions that backhanders were being paid to a player or three.

I have not known a football administrator in any code who hasn’t been party to arrangements such as getting a so-called independent third party to top up the wages of a player his club wanted to keep when the money involved would take them over the salary cap limit.

The art is to do it in a way that the controlling body OKs it as being for services rendered to the third party and not for playing football.

I have always thought it amazing that Visy in Melbourne, for example, found Carlton players so much more suitable as trainee executives than players from other clubs but what are rich patrons, such as the late Dick Pratt, for if not to recognise future managerial talent when they see it?

Clubs with less benevolent supporters must find other ways and I always admired the club that for years sold tickets in a first scorers double at its home matches without any of the cash raised ever finding its way into its official accounts.

Brown paper bags were a much more convenient way of dealing with the readies raised than putting them in the bank and I’m guessing that with the National Rugby League now pretending to be serious about enforcing the salary cap there will be more of such cash transactions for players in future.