The Cult: Hansie Cronje

This week's addition to The Cult left his sport in disgrace over his role in a match-fixing scandal. You can (in fact you must) read our previous entries here.

Humans are, to some degree, pathetically silly creatures. I don't know if you've been keeping up with Sky's cricket coverage. In it, they've devised a thing – let's be nice and call it an innovation – that gauges how many revolutions per second a spinner is capable of putting on the ball, and relays this information with a graphic. Know how many people want to see that? Four. Four people, and I suspect none of them are the type of character you'd want to be stuck in a lift with. All of the spinners, as far as my sagging eyes noticed, spin the ball with roughly the same amount of revolutions; because obviously, what actually counts when you're a spinner is where you then put that ball. The graphic wouldn't get that though; whereas if you were to simply stand on the edge of the popping crease and hurl the ball to the sky with as much revolutionary zeal as you could muster, it would presumably be A-Okay with the graphic.

I'm not sure when it was that I hit the slippery slope I'm now trying to make a home on – going from thinking that everything I witnessed on TV and in adverts and in the general slew of information directed at me was put there by sensible people who'd picked the best option, to not thinking that. More and more, with everything you lay your eyes on, you can feel a vacant equation beating at its heart that goes new x [requires new technology] = better. I know how pathetically fogeyish that sounds, but here's how I'd justify it: everyone knows, really, truly, deep down and in the dead of night, that not a lot of genuinely new stuff is happening. We're trapped at a precipice, stalled beneath a waterfall of cosmetic 'new' trying to convince ourselves it amounts to progress.

The cricket I watched in the early '90s looked old. The on-screen graphics were basically the equivalent of some guy occasionally holding a scoreboard aloft, or writing in pen on the screen which player it was you were looking at. And the South African team of that decade, to my eyes, divided into two: wily, flinty old timers like Gary Kirsten and Jonty Rhodes. Then full-blooded, open-faced veldt-bashers: Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher, Sean Pollock, Allan Donald. Of course, there was another group, represented occasionally by Makhaya Ntini, who made it very evident that cricket in South Africa was a predominantly white sport. And then, finally, there was just a single guy who fitted in no group, with his dark, brooding presence. He was the captain. The one in charge. That was Hansie Cronje.

I don't want to paint myself as too much of a naïf in my distant youth, but if you'd told me that the sport I was watching was rigged – whatever it was – I wouldn't really have known what you meant. These people are here because they want to try their hardest to beat each other; and that they did want that was at the time pretty inseparable in my mind from them being there. I have dim memories around the time Hansie Cronje became captain of the national side of another African, Bruce Grobbelaar, along with John Fashanu and Hans Segars, appearing on the news for something that I didn't really get.

Now it's pitiful how little faith I have that anyone – outside a small gilded coterie of elite sportspeople who don't have to worry about money – is immune to match fixing. As was brilliantly reported by Brian Blickenstaff for this site, players from AFC Hornchurch in the Conference South are rigging matches. Lance Armstrong was rigging. Athletes from top to bottom are rigging. Chris Cairns, a New Zealand international and peer of Cronje's, is alleged to have rigged. Salman Butt, Pakistani captain and generous ruiner of the prospects of shining new teenager Mohammad Aamer by using him as a patsy, went to jail in 2011 for rigging. Baseball players, even ones richer than God, are rigging. For them, you could say that their version of rigging demonstrates it's not actually the money that counts but the glory, which is a worrying thought.

For Hansie Cronje, it was unquestionably the money. $15,000 to Herschelle Gibbs to score fewer runs. $15,000 to Henry Williams to concede more runs. And then, you presume, a representative of Sanjay Chawla, acting for an Indian betting syndicate, would meet Cronje in some anonymous hotel with a suitcase and gratitude.

In my young heart, one of the most compelling things to imagine was the team-talk a captain would get to give to his players before a big match. I was decent at sport at school, and even got to be captain a few times, and even in those low-stakes contests it still felt like a thing, to speak to your teammates beforehand and start getting the old game-heads on. What would it feel like, with the hubbub from a full stadium outside reverberating into the dressing-room, knowing that a large percentage of your country was watching? In Hansie Cronje's dressing-room, it would feel like sharp eyes on certain players to make sure they remembered their responsibilities.

The first and only teams to ever forfeit an innings in cricketing history were the England team, captained by a trusting Nasser Hussain, and the South African side captained by Hansie Cronje. If you felt the draw seemed nailed-on, given how much batting there was left to come after losing days to bad weather, it's what you'd do to turn it into either a win or a loss. Which, you can imagine, Cronje had his reasons for, and sold it to Hussain as 'making it a contest'. And then it becomes impossible to watch the footage below without seeing it everywhere. That galumphing drive Kallis plays around the ball to get out; Daryll Cullinan smacking the ball directly up in the air and walking before it's even been caught. All quite possibly innocent, but you can't help but think. Nor, during a brief spell of bowling when one of his deliveries is knocked to the fence, can you help but think that a penny for the thoughts of Hansie Cronje, watching it go, would probably not match their market value.

"He always had an adventurous part of him that was inquisitive. Playing cricket year in, year out, living in hotels and airports I think becomes tedious and boring after a while. Maybe a bit of boredom set in and maybe this was something a bit interesting." Frans Cronje, brother.

Words @TobySprigings / Illustration @Dan_Draws