Peter Robinson
One by one they have taken the stand, damned Hansie Cronje with their evidence and then sought to soften the blow by declaring their respect for the fallen former captain. “The finest captain South Africa has ever had,” is typical of the sentiment. It has occurred to none of Cronje’s erstwhile team-mates that they might have served under the most disgraced captain the game has known.
If the King commission continues along the course it has taken since its hearings began just over a week ago, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, Cronje is about to be drummed out of cricket for life. His place in the history of the game will be alongside Salim Malik as a man whose greed shamed his nation and his sport.
And somehow Cronje’s sins seem worse than the Pakistani’s does. Partly this might be a chauvinistic take on the affair (after all, everyone knows that the Pakistanis are always up to something, aren’t they?), but it is also a reflection of the affection in which South African cricket has been held since readmission in 1991.
After two decades of politically induced isolation, South Africa rejoined the fold with a short tour of India followed by a debut at the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. During both ventures the returning South Africans were hailed wherever they went.
In India literally thousands turned out to welcome Clive Rice’s team; at Sydney, after the rain rules had cruelly eliminated Kepler Wessels team in the World Cup semi- finals, the players embarked on a spontaneous lap of honour. And as they passed each section of a packed Sydney Cricket Ground, each section rose, one after the other, including that which contained the Barmy Army, in ovation. It was a moment and a sight to bring a lump to the throat and a prickle in the eyes.
The modern-era South Africans had to deal with the shadow of the great Springbok side of 1970, but gradually they forged their own identity. They were tough, competitive, effective rather than brilliant – and clean. Blessed by outstanding seam bowlers, they were often able to overcome the shortcomings of a brittle top order. Most importantly, though, they managed to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This was achieved by an ethos which seemed to bind the team ever closer with each passing season and tour. Back in Sydney in 1994, Fanie de Villiers declared that “South Africans never give up” as the side, under acting skipper Cronje, clawed out an astonishing Test victory over Australia.
One for all and all for one, they clambered up the unofficial Test and one- day international ladders. At the beginning of the year, when Cronje took them back to India, they were probably second only to Australia in both forms of the game.
And yet somewhere along the way, a cancer began to grow, unknown and unseen and ignored by those closest to it.
Time and again during the hearings, the King commission’s Shamila Bahoti has asked players why they didn’t want to know where the offers had come from. Time and again the response has been a figurative shrug. It simply didn’t occur to them to ask.
Bahoti clearly struggles to understand this way of thinking. The reason for this, perhaps, is simply that she isn’t a lad.
Stripped down, the notion of team spirit is little more than an extension of the urge of boys to group together, declaring undying loyalty to one another. Girls may have their cliques, but they tend not to swear secret oaths or slice open grubby hands in order to become blood brothers.
Team sports depend on this and great teams have great team spirit. Success generates team spirit and team spirit breeds success. Which comes first is a moot point, but at almost every level of every team sport, the better teams are those which have bonded closest together.
In the case of the South Africans this ethos has been taken to the nth degree. Under Wessels at first and then Cronje the emphasis on the group and on sticking together grew ever greater.
You have to allow, too, the fact that the modern international cricketer spends more time away than he does at home. He lives, eats, sleeps and shares a bathroom with his roommate. And so an intense loyalty grows.
As far as we know, the first time the South African team had to consider match- fixing as a unit was in Bombay in 1996. It came at the end of a brutally tough tour, with the players exhausted and many of them ill. Dave Richardson has testified as to the distance between them and manager Robbie Muzzell.
A decent and likeable man, Muzzell found the Indian tour too much with which to cope and Richardson said Muzzell a board member who had landed the side with an impossibly taxing itinerary and an unwanted final match agreed with the players’ complaints.
These are circumstances that close ranks, and the South Africans, at that point, were in no mood to confide in anyone outside the inner circle. Since 1996, Goolam Rajah, assistant manager in India, has taken over the manager’s role. Equally decent and likeable, Rajah is more a mother hen than a father figure. He sees his job as being to protect the team, to cocoon them and shield them from the outside world.
And within this cocoon a different type of morality grew, one which ensured that no one dreamed of snitching on his team- mates, least of all the captain, who was by some distance the alpha male of the group.
Without the initial investigations by the Indian police, it is doubtful that any South African player would voluntarily have revealed Cronje’s offers and approaches. They would have tamped down their own doubts and carried on, and no one, least of all United Cricket Board chief Ali Bacher, would have been any the wiser.
You rather wonder whether any of the current South Africans would have heard John Lennon’s scornful dismissal of Mick Jagger after the Beatles had broken up. The problem with Mick, said Lennon, is that he still wants to be in a gang even though he’s grown up.
The problem with the South African team, perhaps, is that they’re still in their own gang and they don’t want to grow up. Only when they do can we be sure that another Cronje won’t come along to prey on the weak and the stupid and the greedy.