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Prabhakar tapes doctored, says Lele

BCCI secretary Jaywant Lele claimed that the tape recording of a conversation he allegedly had with Manoj Prabhakar, wherein Lele appears to have implicated two current, and one past, cricketer in match-fixing, was doctored.

Lele, famed for his denial-a-minute style of functioning, told a section of the media in New Delhi that he wasn't even interested in hearing the tape released by Prabhakar 24 hours ago. "Obviously, Prabhakar doctored it. I have two witnesses when I talked to him, Nayan Mongia and a local senior sports editor, they were there and they will vouch for what I had told Prabhakar."

Lele told the media that all he said was that he too could name players, that anyone could take names but it didn't constitute proof of anything. "Prabhakar has edited the tape, he has doctored it," Lele claimed.

Lele however left two questions unanswered. If it is true that he was merely pointing out that anyone could name names, why, later in the conversation, did he say that he had told Jagmohan Dalmiya about his suspicions, and further told the latter that appointing Kapil Dev as coach was a big mistake?

Further, when earlier in the week, Lele was asked about his meeting with Manoj Prabhakar, he said that the latter had merely come to invite him for a function, and that the subject of match-fixing had not even come up in course of the conversation. "We never discussed match-fixing at all," Lele claimed earlier in the week -- a claim that Lele himself goes against now, when he talks of what he supposedly told the former India all-rounder.