National Rugby League players and officials will be made to front the New South Wales Crime Commission "as soon as Thursday as authorities ramp up their probe into alleged match-fixing of rugby league matches," according to Proszenko & Olding of THE AGE. Detectives from the State Crime Command's Organised Crime Squad "launched Strike Force Nuralda to investigate betting patterns on at least three NRL games to determine whether any criminal offences have been committed." Interviews with people of interest "will begin on Thursday, just a day before Brisbane and the Gold Coast open the NRL finals series at Suncorp Stadium." The development "has the ability to derail the finals prospects of any side containing league identities viewed as persons of interest" (THE AGE, 9/7). In Sydney, Brent Read wrote there were reports "that the mobile phone of a leading player had been confiscated as part of the police investigation, which could eventually result in players receiving life bans from the game, or at worst criminal convictions." There "are two schools of thought about the decision to launch a strike force with the involvement of the crime commission, a body that has unfettered powers to compel people to provide evidence." One school suggests that "the police have hit a wall in their investigation and have called on the power of the crime commission to evince some evidence from the parties allegedly involved." The other is that the police "have uncovered evidence and have escalated the matter due to the high-profile nature of the code" (THE AUSTRALIAN, 9/8).
