Alec Stewart hints at calling it quits

Bookmaker Mukesh Gupta told CBI he had met the English cricketer seven years ago and paid him 5,000 pounds in return for match information. Stewart rejects the charge. In his statement to CBI, Gupta however, had stated that Stewart refused to fix matches.

Fiercely rejecting Gupta’s claims, Stewart told The Sunday Times that he was happy that ICC’s anti-corruption wing Chief Sir Paul Condon would investigate his bank account and offered to face lie-detector test. “I will do whatever is required,” Stewart said.

English cricket, reeling from the accusation that Stewart took money from a bookmaker now faces criminal investigation into the entire match-fixing affair, The Times reported on Sunday. The embarrassing scenario moved a step closer with the revelation that the England and Wales Cricket Board have completed their secret inquiry into two matches between Lancashire and Essex in August 1991. Now the next step is probable police investigation.Allegations that the results of the matches one county championship fixture, the other a Sunday League game were fixed came originally from former Zimbabwe coach and Essex player Don Topley.

The ECB decided to re-open investigations when other witnesses came forward this summer. Formerly, the County Cricket Board had dismissed Topley’s allegations when he initially made them in a series of newspaper articles in the winter of 1994-95.

In addition to Topley, Guy Lovell, a spin bowler who was playing his only first-team game for Essex and now works as a plumber in Lancashire, has always maintained that matches were fixed. The new witnesses are understood to be Essex players who have retired from the game.

Answering queries from the newsmen in Rawalpindi before leaving for Peshawar, Stewart said he would carry on playing for England and give his best, “as I’ve always done. What has happened will not make me more determined, because I have always given everything whenever I have pulled on an England shirt,” he said.

The Former England captain accepted he may be a target for crowd abuse when he goes out to bat against Pakistan in the first Test next week, but is determined not to be affected. “If they think they’re going to distract me that way, they’re wrong. It would be water off a duck’s back.”The ECB Chairman Lord MacLaurin said the Board would pursue the issue of match-fixing in the county game. “We are determined to clear up the problems in the game,” he said here.

Now that the ECB’s inquiry has been completed, their dossier is to be handed over to the police for them to decide if criminal prosecutions are warranted.