Ghost of Cronje’s match-fixing past about to haunt SA
STUART HESS
HANSIE Cronje will be dead 18 years in June. But does he still have secrets and are those secrets in danger of being revealed in an Indian court?
Cronje’s reputation has become a matter of some debate for South Africans. There’s the camp that believes all should be forgiven, while another won’t forgive and still others feel bygones should be bygones.
Last month was the 20th anniversary of what is now known as the ‘leather jacket Test’ in which Cronje’s declaration of a South African innings and then offer to England captain, Nasser Hussain, led to an exciting final day of what had been a rain-ruined Test in Centurion.
Back in 2000, Cronje was viewed as innovative, but now, with the clear and truthful perspective of hindsight, we know what nefarious deeds led to Cronje’s offer.
This week, Cronje’s name popped up again.
Sanjeev Chawla the man whose voice was on the other side of those famous taped phone recordings in 2000 of Cronje accepting offers to fix parts of matches during South Africa’s ODI series against India in 2000, was set to be extradited back to India from England.
Chawla, said to be a middle man between players and the Indian underworld, has been ‘staying’ in England for the last 19 years.
It is seemingly the end of a fouryear battle for Indian authorities to get Chawla to appear in an Indian court. Chawla, who according to the Daily Mail lives in a £1 million (about R19 million) home in North London, has exhausted all avenues in the UK legal system, with his year long appeal falling on deaf ears.
This week the UK’S Court of Appeal found the 52 year old must be extradited.
Indian police are due to arrive in the English capital to escort Chawla out of that country by February 20.
Chawla filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg for “an interim measure to stay his extradition to India,” but the court turned down that request.
What could this mean for Cronje and the betting saga that gripped world sport for two years from April 2000, until the conclusion of judge Edwin King’s Commission of Inquiry?
Cronje told the Commission how he first met Chawla along with a man called Hamid Cassim – said at the time to be close to the South African team – in a Durban hotel during a triangular series involving England and Zimbabwe in early 2000.
Subsequently reports emerged in the UK media of Cronje having 70 bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, none of which had been declared to the SA Revenue Service.
Might Chawla, when he appears in court, reveal anything about those accounts?
And if he does will it tear into the scab of this old wound and further sully Cronje’s name or is his name so far removed from South Africa’s psyche that regardless of what happens in that Indian court, it won’t matter?
Cronje left an indelible mark on not just cricket, but sport and more broadly South African society.
Until his downfall, the post-isolation years had been a celebration of the flourishing ‘rainbow nation’.
The Cronje saga put an end to that age of innocence.
In April it will be 20 years since an Indian police official first leaked to the media in that country that he had telephonic recordings of conversations between Cronje and Chawla.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands, the likes of Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams were banned and lots of tears flowed.
Those ghosts are set to haunt South Africa again, and if Chawla does have to testify in an Indian court, those ghosts may send shivers down South African spines once more.