Hansie Cronje did err, but.....

Raju Korti

Lest anyone jumps to conclusion, I must clarify at the outset. This is not holding a brief for the late Proteas skipper Wessel Johannes Hansie Cronje who had overstepped the fault line on more occasions than one ever since the first known case of match-fixing surfaced in Nagpur in 1996. But somehow, like the vividly sketched negative characters in James Hadley Chase novels, even a vilified Cronje begs my sympathy.
I will not stir up history to recall the murkier aspects of that match although I was present at the Vidarbha Cricket Association ground on that day when not only spectators were taken for a ride, even the so called gentleman's game took a beating. What had impressed me during the pre-match briefing of the rival skippers was Cronje's impeccable manners. His demeanour was befitting an international statesman and if I can recollect correctly, very uncharacteristically of me, I had extended a hand at him which he shook with a genuine smile. He just nodded his head in acknowledgement when I wished him. To cut the long story short, there was something about the man that instantly appealed to me. Cronje was then just 26 but a hero to the cricketing fraternity, including the two non-Whites Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams who "nailed" his role in the match fixing.
Sixteen years hence and almost more than a decade later, after Hansie died unsung in a plane crash, Williams is battling a stricken conscience. Williams told Sunday Times that it was on the advice of their lawyers that he alongwith Gibbs gave false testimonies against Cronje before the King Commission of Enquiry in 2000 to make a strong case against the late captain.
Williams admitted that he and teammate Gibbs had lied about accepting an offer of $15,000 from Cronje to under-perform in the Nagpur one-dayer. He buttressed his falsehood with the argument that he was told he could be prosecuted if he came clean and therefore "pressured" into giving such a testimony. Williams said something to the effect that the controversy had been laid to rest and that he might as well speak about it since he "just wanted it to be put to rest and let go of it." On his part, Gibbs hasn't said anything new than what he wrote in his biography "To The Point": That although he was indeed offered a bribe by Cronje to under-perform, he had great admiration for his captain.
Mike Fitzgerald and Peter Whelan -- the lawyers denied Williams' allegations, saying the player told the truth once Gibbs had done so -- after unsuccessfully trying to lie their way out of the situation. "That's outrageous. Why would I give my own client a version that implicates him?" Fitzgerald told the paper. Whelan called the claims "fundamental rubbish".
The professional probity of some of the dramatis personae in the l'affaire Cronje, can come in for serious questioning even at this juncture. To begin with, can there be a hearing after the verdict? William's experiment with truth has come in much too late for even Cronje's guilty soul to feel any better. Cronje isn't alive to reconstruct the events in the light of this new development.
To be fair to Cronje, he did admit to his culpability in laisioning with the Indian and South African bookies. The man who was voted the eleventh best South African despite being banned for life for his devious role in match-fixing scandal, deserved a more sympathetic deal. Afterall, he was also the best captain the country ever had untill Graeme Smith outscored his records. But not only was Cronje's honest confession given a short shrift, his pleas challenging thre harsh life ban were dismissed. Would this have been possible in India where cricketers are pampered to a nauseating extent? Not one of the many Indian cricketrs whose names figured in match-fixing, came in for the kind of crucifixing that Cronje did. To the South African cricket authorities, reform wasn't an option at all. I am willing to bet that Cronje -- seen in tears during his cross-examination at the King Commission of Enquiry -- would have started on a clean slate. Even if they wanted to make an example out of Cronje, they could have rehabilitated him elsewhere in some other capacity. Nothing of the kind happened and finally Cronje died a broken man -- a tragic death in a plane crash -- when he was barely 32. To me, it was a case of punishment being way too harsh for the crime he committed and the subsequent penitence that he showed.
Theories that Cronje was murdered on the orders of a cricket betting syndicate flourished after his death. I wouldn't want to expend energies speculating on them, but Cronje certainly deserved one more chance. The man who deserved his place under the Sun, faded into the dark pages of history. And that's why my heart reaches to poor Hansie.