Daniel Vettori has admitted he was alerted to allegations of Chris Cairns match fixing two years earlier than he reported to anti-corruption officials.
Giving evidence at Cairns's perjury trial in London on Thursday, Vettori faced tough questions about his initial claim that Brendon McCullum reported a spot-fixing approach by Cairns to him in 2010.
"I'm going to suggest your timing is wrong, and deliberately wrong," Cairns's lawyer, Orlando Pownall QC, said.
After Mr Pownall went through a number of other witnesses accounts, Vettori conceded he had his dates wrong and McCullum had actually spoken to him in 2008.
"I was always conflicted around those timings, and, from understanding the timeline of other people speaking, I realise that I've made a mistake," he said.
"I was confused because of the 2008 tour to Bangladesh in October, and then the 2010 tour to Bangladesh in October."
Mr Pownall suggested that Vettori had feared the repercussions for himself and McCullum because of their failure to report the approach sooner.
Vettori denied that: "I made a mistake on the timings of it, but I've never been concerned about being sanctioned ... that never crossed my mind."
Vettori said McCullum came to him and Kyle Mills while on a team bus in Bangladesh and asked for a private word.
In a hotel room later, McCullum told them Cairns had asked him to spot fix and had said "all the big boys were doing it", Vettori said, adding that he did not remember too many details.
"We were pretty shocked by the comment, so we left it at that rather than digging into it."
McCullum and Vettori reported the approach to Anti Corruption and Security Unit official John Rhodes in 2011, two and a half years after McCullum says Cairns first approached him about fixing.
Vettori told the court he also mentioned to Mr Rhodes a separate, fairly innocuous, incident that arose after he and Cairns had done a promotional tour for a toothpaste campaign in 2006 in India.
Each man was to receive $US15,000 for the tour.
"I asked Chris to use that money to buy a diamond, because he was working for a diamond company at the time," Vettori said.
"I didn't receive the diamond, Chris returned the money in pounds about two years later."
Vettori said he was given about STG9000 in 20-pound notes.
"I thought it would be prudent to mention that," he told the court.
Cairns is facing a charge of perjury in relation to a 2012 libel trial in which he sated that he never, ever cheated at cricket.
He and co-defendant Andrew Fitch-Holland also face a charge of perverting the course of justice for trying to get another New Zealand cricketer, Lou Vincent, to provide a false statement for the libel case.
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