Match fixer tells how captain recruited him
AUCKLAND: New Zealand Test cricketer Daryl Tuffey threatened “to f****** kill” his teammate Chris Cairns over huge match-fixing payments that were not made, according to a third teammate and confessed match fixer, Lou Vincent.
Cairns, a former Black Caps captain, is on trial for perjury and perverting the course of justice, after he successfully sued an Indian cricket administrator who accused him on Twitter of fixing matches.
Vincent, a 36-yearold former batsman who has been banned from cricket for life, has claimed that it was Cairns who recruited him into the world of match-fixing, when they played together for the Chandigarh Lions in the Indian Premier League.
Vincent claimed Tuffey had told him at a chance meeting that he had “not received one cent” from Cairns, despite promises of payments amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
In a 2012 trial, 45-year-old Cairns successfully sued the Indian Premier League commissioner, Lalit Modi, for libel, and claimed under oath during that trial that he had “never, ever cheated at cricket”.
Last September, the Metropolitan Police announced it would be prosecuting Cairns for perjury over the trial.
Vincent alleges that Cairns was at the centre of a matchfixing ring and would, with the assistance of willing teammates, deliberately lose matches while captain of the Chandigarh Lions. Vincent told the Southwark Crown Court: “He (Cairns) used and abused me. Chewed me up and spat me out.”
Later this week the trial is expected to hear from Brendon McCullum, another former New Zealand captain, who has claimed to have been approached by Cairns about assisting him in fixing matches.
Under cross-examination, Vincent was shown videos from a Chandigarh Lions match which he has claimed to have been paid to throw, but instead scored a four and six from consecutive balls. Vincent claimed his footwork had been “horrendous” and that what Cairns’s barrister, Orlando Pownall, called “a square cut from the middle of the bat” had in fact been what “any professional cricketer would say is a thick outside edge”.
Cairns played 62 Tests for New Zealand, taking more than 200 wickets and scoring more than 3 000 runs in a 16year Test career from 1989 to 2004. – The Independent