Obituary: Hansie Cronje

* Cricketer. Died aged 32.

Even now, two years on, it is difficult to comprehend the enormity of Hansie Cronje's crimes against cricket.

He was the captain of South Africa, an icon as a man as well as a cricketer, revered by his players and idolised in a country which craves heroes. And he was a Christian.

In the spring of 2000 it was revealed that he had taken bribes to fix the outcome of matches. Cronje had been on the take, and had encouraged others in his team to take with him.

It was a stunning violation of trust that reverberated around the world and has never been satisfactorily explained.

In a perverse way, maybe Cronje did cricket a favour.

It was becoming widely known that matches were being fixed by illegal Indian bookmakers through the simple expedient of bribing players. But nobody was doing anything. The International Cricket Council barely paid lip service to the scandal.

Cronje was exposed by accident. Indian police involved in another inquiry were suddenly confronted with tapes of his mobile phone calls to his contacts.

At first the world was incredulous. Hansie? Not Hansie. Anybody but Hansie.

It slowly emerged that everything the Indian cops said was right. And more.

Cronje coughed, but not much. He resigned in disgrace. A commission of inquiry was instituted in his homeland, and the ICC at last realised that it had to act.

Slowly, the truth was partially uncovered. It has never been revealed how many players were involved. But at last something was done.

The strange thing was what happened to Cronje. To all intents and purposes he left public life, but opprobrium was not long heaped on him.

South Africa appeared to go into a kind of denial. The King Commission never got to grips with the depth of his wrongdoing. Cronje ran for cover behind lawyers. A deal was struck.

The message emanating from the republic was that he was guilty but it was no big deal. Hansie was still their hero, they still needed heroes.

He made appearances on the lecture circuit, offering motivational advice. It was proposed, though not formally, that he still had a role to play in cricket. It was suggested that he might be one of the ambassadors for the World Cup in South Africa.

In the rest of the world this did not wash. Cronje had betrayed the loyalty of his fellows. He had been greedy, he had besmirched a great sport, made a laughing stock of one the great tenets: it isn't cricket.

Yet only this week former England captain Alec Stewart said that Cronje was a great cricketer who still had something to offer, coaching kids, perhaps. Kids, you might think, were the last people to be put in the way of a man who had shown so little contrition.

Cronje was born in Bloemfontein, went to Grays College there and was head boy - a natural leader from the start. He was from the liberal wing of Afrikanerdom.

When he was chosen to replace Kepler Wessels as South African captain, nobody was too surprised. But if it was a natural elevation, even then there were suggestions from those who detected flaws that it would end in tears. Cronje always liked the colour of money.

He had left Bloemfontein for a palatial home in George on the Southern Cape. Recently he landed a job in Johannesburg as a financial consultant with an agricultural equipment firm which, it was said, had been impressed by one of his motivational talks.

In view of what he did, it is difficult to assess Cronje as a cricketer. He made 68 test appearances for South Africa, 53 as captain, and 188 more in one-day internationals, 138 of them as captain.

Many of the players he led were still in touch with him. They could not forget what he had done for them, batsman Gary Kirsten said.

On reflection, Hansie Cronje must have been made up of paradoxes. A God- fearing cheat, a leader who betrayed his men.

When the plane in which he was travelling crashed, he took a murky past with him. We will never know it all now.

- INDEPENDENT