Former professional tennis player Nick Lindahl. Credit:Paul Miller For police tipped off by bookmakers about unusual bets on Anderson's match against Harrison Lombe, it is a curious error: is this the moment when Anderson starts to fix the match by throwing the first set? For those in the tennis world, who learned about Anderson's alleged match-fixing last week, three months after the Traralgon double fault, the question was broader: why are talented young Australian players increasingly being linked to corruption? On January 29, the Australian Open men's singles champion will lift the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup on the centre of Rod Laver Arena before the packed grandstands and the world's media. Every boy who picks up a racquet, from Traralgon to Toowoomba, dreams of standing there, of becoming the first local to win the Australian Open since 1976.

Nick Lindahl beat teenage sensation Bernard Tomic in the Australian Open play-offs in 2009. Credit:Getty Images But, around the time they become men, hundreds of these boys will realise they probably aren't good enough. And here the danger lies. Former tennis coach and player Matthew Fox appears on charges of match-fixing and drug trafficking at Melbourne Magistrates Court. Credit:Patrick Scala For deliberately dropping a set, a tennis journeyman could be paid tens of thousands of dollars by match-fixers. It is about the same amount he could be paid for winning a tournament at Futures or Challenger level, the two lowest tiers of professional tennis.

Twenty minutes of tanking, months worth of cash. Your career is never going to amount to anything anyway. What do you have to lose? Rod Laver Arena during last year's Australian Open men's final. Credit:Getty Images Before he was a match-fixer, Nick Lindahl was an Australian tennis bad boy several years before Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic hit the headlines. During one outburst at a tournament at Sydney Olympic Park, he bounced a racquet over the court fence and into the lap of a leading tennis administrator. In 2010, he was banned from the Australian Open wildcard play-offs, along with two other young players.

"This action has been taken following reports of numerous accounts of unacceptable behaviour at tournaments both locally and internationally over the past few months," Tennis Australia's director of men's tennis Todd Woodbridge said at the time."All players are expected to abide by Tennis Australia's code of ethics and behaviour ... the opportunity to participate in the Australian Open play-off is a privilege, not a right."This decision will send a clear message to all Australian players that breaching this code will not be supported by Tennis Australia through the granting of wildcards or other financial support." Within three years, Lindahl found another means of financial support. On September 8, 2013, he learnt he was drawn to play Andrew Corbitt in the first round of the Futures tournament in Toowoomba. He had three days to organise a fix. Lindahl convinced Brandon Walkin, a 19-year-old tennis player ranked in the 1600s, to approach Corbitt and tell him Lindahl was willing to throw the match so that Corbitt could earn his first ATP rankings point, a not insignificant reward that would grant him easier entry to future tournaments, and a world ranking.

Corbitt told Walkin he thought he could beat Lindahl anyway. After he did, 6-2, 6-3, Corbitt reported Walkin's approach to the match referee. As Corbitt spoke to the referee, thousands of kilometres away, in Victoria, half a dozen punters had lined their pockets with cash by betting on the match. Matthew Fox, a former tennis coach and professional player who reached a ranking of 1264, had got a tip from his mate Lindahl about the fix, and passed it on to some friends. They cleaned up when Corbitt, an unranked outsider, flogged Lindahl, the former world 186.

Eighteen days later, Fox got another tip: Adam Feeney, a 28-year-old from Sydney who worked as a tennis coach with Lindahl and had a career-high ranking of 248, was going to throw his first-round match in Traralgon. Feeney was drawn to play Bumpei Sato, a Japanese player ranked more than 500 places below him. Sato won 6-4, 6-4. Police found that Fox and several others who bet on the Lindahl fix also backed Sato. It has never been revealed how much Lindahl or Feeney earned from the fixes, or what those who had the inside mail claimed from bookies. Police found that Fox alone won more than $4100 with the gambling accounts they knew about, though they suspected he had others.

It may seem a trifling amount. But if Fox won that much simply by betting on the fixes, what were Lindahl and Feeney paid? And what did the others who bet on the matches – who, like Feeney, were never charged – win? Perhaps the biggest question of all, and one that haunts tennis figures and police alike, is whether there was a Mr Big controlling the whole syndicate. Police suspected the fixing syndicate possibly earned more than six figures overall from the two matches, but couldn't prove it. Another unanswered question is whether Lindahl and his friends were fixing matches well before they were sprung. Lindahl's record shows several losses to unranked players, and other matches against associates, where the possibility of corruption is significantly heightened, in the years before the Toowoomba match.

In early 2010, he was ranked in the top 200. By the time his career ended, less than four years later, he had career prize money of $217,000. But over eight years once travel and accommodation costs are factored in, and even assuming he had other income from, for example, coaching, it's hardly huge money. And Lindahl was clearly the most successful of the players linked to corruption in the past three years. If match-fixing was so compelling to a talented player who reached the top 200 in the world, how do you convince one ranked in the 1000s to stay on the straight and narrow? It is the second year in a row that match-fixing has marred the lead-up to the Australian Open. News of Anderson's case broke on January 5. On Tuesday, the Tennis Integrity Unit announced the outcome of an independent anti-corruption hearing involving the earlier case of Lindahl, Walkin and another player, Isaac Frost.

Lindahl, 28, was banned for seven years and fined $US35,000 ($48,000). Walkin, 22, had co-operated with authorities so received a six-month suspension, suspended for six months. This meant that Walkin played at a Challenger tournament in Canberra last week. Frost, 28, was provisionally suspended from October 2013 to September the next year. Before last year's Open, BBC and Buzzfeed created international headlines when they ran a story alleging there were suspicious betting patterns on matches involving high-profile players. While Tennis Australia is dismayed by the latest scandals, they claim the sport has turned a corner. "We have upped the ante ... [but] it's disappointing, there's no doubt about it," Ann West, head of integrity and compliance, said last week.

"You would be naive to say it wasn't." Authorities – including Victoria Police – are encouraged that sporting bodies and gambling companies are more co-operative than in the past. Concerns remain about in-play betting, which is particularly lucrative in cases of spot-fixing, such as that which Anderson is alleged to have committed, and the huge number of unregulated bookmakers, who do not co-operate with police by passing on suspicious gambling data. Tennis figures have called for increased prize money at smaller tournaments to make it less attractive for young players to cheat, at the same time as Tennis Australia boasts about making it harder for players to get away with any corrupt behaviour. There is no doubt, however, that match-fixing will again plague Australian tennis. Tennis Australia is begrudgingly prepared for this inevitability, in a similar way to which football codes brace for the first stories of players getting into mischief every off-season.

Anderson is due in court on March 2. He is understood to have made full admissions about the fix, and to be co-operating with Victoria Police so more could soon be known about the others involved. In another recent development, Fairfax Media was told last week that an associate of Lindahl and Feeney has been prevented by a major bookmaker from withdrawing cash he made after betting on tennis matches. And perhaps the most explosive revelations of all will come when an independent review into the integrity of tennis, announced by the governing bodies of tennis in the wake of last year's international fixing revelations, is completed. In the second set of his match in Traralgon, Anderson is flying. The lethargic movement and double faults of the first set, which he lost 4-6, are gone. Every ball he hits seems faster, lower, more accurate.

He has broken Lombe's serve and is 2-0 up when a camera fixed to a fence behind the baseline, which provides the only footage of the match, dislodges and points downward. Sounds of the match – squeaks of shoes, balls hitting string – can still be heard, but the only vision is of a small patch of Plexipave blue court, well beyond the baseline, and part of the fence. It is bizarre enough watching footage of a tennis match which is alleged to be thrown, but it takes on another layer of weird when the only camera providing footage of the match fails at a pivotal moment. There is nothing sinister about the camera error, however. It is merely a classic example of the aphorism that when deciding whether something is due to a conspiracy or incompetence, go with the latter. But for police and Tennis Australia, the other mistakes in this case –such as a double fault – actually do point to a conspiracy.