Perjury hearing just not cricket
Brick and all rectangles, London’s bleak and forbidding Southwark Crown Court is far removed from the thwack of willow on leather on a grassy English village green; it’s simply not cricket in any sense.
Yet on Monday and for the next few weeks it will be more about cricket and its image than the traditional and elegant Lord’s cricket ground across the Thames River, or The Oval it shares the south bank with.
Southwark, a building so concentrated on serious legal business it was built with its back to majestic views across the Thames to the Tower of London, will host evidence about the dark art of match fixing, as the perjury trial of former Black Caps captain Chris Cairns gets under way, after a stuttering start last week.
This is serious business, worse than match fixing.
Perjury is a criminal charge. Cairns, 45, is accused of lying under oath in court when he said ‘‘I have never, ever, cheated at cricket. Nor would I ever contemplate such a thing’’.
If found guilty, the maximum sentence is seven years’ jail. Cairns has denied all charges, saying he stands by his evidence.
The words in question were uttered by Cairns as he saw off Lalit Modi in a London case in 2012, when he took the Indian businessman to court for libel and won. Modi had to pay him damages and costs said to amount more than NZ$3 million.
As a result, Cairns is now facing a more deadly attack, the British Crown Prosecution Service with its immense resources.
Crown prosecutor Sasha Wass QC has already had a free hit at Cairns in her opening statement last week, in which she outlined what various witnesses would say.
She played a Skype interview between the cricketer’s legal adviser Andrew Fitch-Holland and Lou Vincent in which he appeared to be cajoling Vincent to give false evidence to the libel case. Vincent is to give evidence from the witness box on Monday.
Wass will have to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that Cairns did lie.
Cairns risked his reputation taking the libel case against Modi, and will remain intent on preserving it this time.
His defence tactics are yet to be revealed, though Wass warned the jury he was likely to try to attack the reputation of key witnesses Vincent and Brendon McCullum, an old friend he has fallen out with.
McCullum is expected to say Cairns talked to him in India in 2008 about spread betting – where punters bet on brackets of scores, such as under or over 50 runs being scored in the first 10 overs.
McCullum will in evidence say he declined to get involved, then Cairns made another approach later that year in England. Cairns rejects that there was any such approach.
Cairns was a world cricketing great, a Wisden player of the year in 2000, which heightens world interest in the trial outcome.
The son of Lance Cairns, a New Zealand cricketing cult hero, he took more than 200 test wickets and hit more than 3000 runs, in 58 tests.
He was three times awarded player of the year by the New Zealand Cricket Almanack, and once held the world record for most sixes in tests (87).
Only Richard Hadlee, Daniel Vettori and Chris Martin have taken more test wickets for the Black Caps. His test debut was in 1989, his last test in June 2004, and his last ODI in 2006.
After retiring from the international game he played professionally in England and the cricketing hot-bed India, so cricket officials across the world will be nervous about what will be revealed in Southwark Crown Court.