No evidence of fixing Test, insist ICC

INTERNATIONAL cricket has closed ranks to try to shoot down suggestions that the third Ashes Test in Perth has been tainted following allegations attempts were made to fix it. The England and Wales Cricket Board and Cricket Australia said there was no evidence that any of their players were involved in any way and the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption head Alex Marshall dismissed the notion of wrongdoing in an initial assessment.

The Sun handed over a dossier to the global governing body following an investigation in which two men — Sobers Joban, a former age-group Indian cricketer, and Priyank Saxena, a tobacco businessman and bookie — claimed they could influence events in international cricket’s marquee event. Ahead of the first morning of the match, Marshall convened a conference call also including ICC chief executive David Richardson plus Tom Harrison and James Sutherland, the respective chief executives of English and Australian boards. ‘We have now received all materials relating to the Sun investigation. We take the allegations extremely seriously and they will be investigated by the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit working with member countries,’ said Marshall. ‘From my initial assessment, there is no evidence, from The

Sun or via our own intelligence, to suggest the current Test match has been corrupted.’ No England players were implicated but the two men — who were secretly filmed during what The Sun described as a ‘four-month investigation’ — insisted they were working with a fixer in the Australian game known as The Silent Man. Sutherland said: ‘Measures have been put in place to ensure the game is protected but there’s no substance, based on intelligence that the ICC has, to suggest we should have significant concerns.’ The ICC’s ACU are investigating as many as seven incidents of potential wrongdoing in the world game, though the Ashes is not thought to be among them.