Soccer player tells of late-night caller offering bribe to fix match

Very late on October 2 last year, the night before a match against Happy Valley, Fourway Rangers defender Jean Jacques Kilama says he received a worrying phone call.

The caller, a football player from another team, suggested he should lose the next day's match in return for which he would be offered 'something' Kilama recalled yesterday.

Although the Cameroon-born player clearly said no, the player came to his home at 6am the next day, and tried, unsuccessfully, to change his mind, Kilama said. 'He asked me how much I wanted. I didn't want to find out how much or what he wanted to give me,' Kilama said.

'I was so scared and called my boss and told him what happened.'

In almost three years in Hong Kong soccer and eight years as a professional player in Cameroon, Romania and Indonesia, the 27-year-old defender says he had never had such an experience.

'I don't need to do that; I like football and my job,' Kilama said. 'We know that after you receive the money you [might as well] kill yourself and you don't know about tomorrow ... I have a family in Hong Kong,' he said. Two months ago his boss, Fourway Rangers director Philip Lee Fai-lap, advised him to go to the Independent Commission Against Corruption - which on Wednesday arrested five footballers in connection with suspected bribery in the fixing of a First Division Football League match on October 3.

Lee said yesterday the club had reported Kilama's experience to the Hong Kong Football Association.