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"Cronje’s testimony rubbish": Azharuddin |
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News |
June 16, 2000
BOMBAY (AP) - Former Indian cricket skipper Mohammed Azharuddin on Thursday dismissed as "rubbish" the testimony of former South African captain Hansie Cronje linking him to the matchfixing scandal.
"It's a disgraced cricketer's desperate bid to deflect attention. I have played all my cricket honestly for more than 16 years," said Azharuddin in a phone interview from Hyderabad in southern India to the web site Cricketnext.com.
Earlier Thursday, Cronje testified before the King Commission in Cape Town that on the evening of the third day of the third test against India in 1996, Azharuddin set up a meeting with a bookie Mukesh Gupta who gave him dlrs 30,000.
Cronje said he was later asked to speak to his teammates to throw a match in return for payment of US dlrs 200,000. He declined.
Azharuddin denied any knowledge of Gupta. "I do not know who this Gupta is ... Cronje is just trying to drag me into a controversy," he said.
He said he had not yet heard Cronje's testimony and would decide his future course of action once he had read the former South Africa captain's statements.
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