Hansie Cronje cashes in and lenient sentences for Gibbs and Williams anger cricket world Peter Robinson Amid mounting speculation that South Africa faces suspension from the International Cricket Council (ICC) for its handling of the match-fixing scandal, it emerged this week that Hansie Cronje pocketed about R1-million for his exclusive interview with South African pay-TV channel M-Net. Sources close to the ICC said South Africa could be punished for having been so lenient with Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams for their involvement in match-fixing. Gibbs was fined R60 000 and Williams R10 000, and both were suspended until the end of the year. The official United Cricket Board (UCB) line is that the ICC will accept the punishments, but this, it has to be said, is a view offered with fingers crossed behind the back. Chris Doig, the chief executive of New Zealand Cricket (NZC), has already criticised the sentences as being too lenient. “It is correct the ICC’s code of conduct commissioner Lord Griffiths can review the decision and veto it. We expect that will happen,” Doig told international cricket website CricInfo this week, also claiming that this view was backed by NZC chair Sir John Anderson. M-Net this week refused to discuss details of Cronje’s remuneration. When asked, SuperSport chief Russell Macmillan said: “It is none of your business and we are not going to comment on how much we paid or did not pay Hansie. We never paid anybody R1-million – that is bullshit.” An impeccable source at M-Net this week, however, suggested that a figure of R1-million was not wildly off the mark. There has been furious debate over the severity or otherwise of these sentences for Gibbs and Williams. The real issue, though, is whether the ICC accepts the punishments. If not then international cricket and the South African game could find themselves facing up to each other. UCB president Percy Sonn acknowledged that South Africa could face sanctions such as “a loss of benefits or the cancellation of tours” if the ICC did not accept the penalties. The ultimate sanction, of course, would be to suspend South Africa from international cricket. Following the announcement of the punishments on Monday, the full 26-page disciplinary report was faxed to the ICC. It will be passed on to Lord Griffiths. Lord Griffiths, or the ICC, will either accept the sentences or reject them. If they are rejected, then they will be referred back to South Africa.
This, at any rate, is how the procedure is understood at the UCB. Attempts to clarify the situation with the ICC this week proved fruitless. Even Bronwyn Wilkinson, the UCB communications manager, was unable to help. She, too, was told that the ICC “would get back to her”. The problem is, of course, that if the sentences are referred back, there is very little that the UCB can do about them. Gibbs and Williams have been charged, tried and sentenced. They cannot, under South African law, be retried and resentenced. Like it or not, the UCB is stuck with the six-month bans for Gibbs and Williams. And this is how it should be. Throughout the match- fixing affair the UCB has been at pains to separate its administrative and judicial functions, and the disciplinary committee which judged Gibbs, Williams and Pieter Strydom was made up of three of South Africa’s most eminent legal minds.
For this the UCB should be commended, but it also means that the UCB could hardly now go back on the disciplinary committee’s findings by, for instance, dissolving the original committee and appointing a new one to retry the hapless pair. This would clearly be a case of the administration interfering in the judicial process and almost certainly be laughed out of court.
Apart from New Zealand, other pressure could come from the subcontinent. Pakistan was upset by UCB managing director Ali Bacher’s allegations of match-fixing during his evidence at the King commission, and India, prompted by a continuing police investigation, could well press for severe penalties. The ICC itself bears some responsibility for the sentences imposed on Gibbs and Williams. Penalties for specific offences relating to match-fixing were drawn up last October but, for reasons that remain unexplained, were distributed only on April 20 this year. This was well after the offences occurred in January and also after Cronje’s initial admission that he had not been entirely honest. The ICC’s administration is notoriously underfunded and understaffed. Clearly, Gibbs and Williams could not be punished in terms of penalties that were only made public after they had agreed with Cronje to underperform. And even when the committee turned to the penalties as a guide, the offences committed by Gibbs and Williams were not quite covered by the two-page document.
An attempt is now being made to plug the loopholes. Four new penalties covering match-fixing offences have been distributed for discussion, two of which refer directly to non-disclosure of approaches for which five-year bans are recommended. A third concerns the non-disclosure of death threats. The current wording of this particular clause begs to go off wandering into a bizarre logical maze: if someone threatens to kill you for disclosing an approach to fix a game, then what happens if he then threatens to kill for disclosing the death threat? Do you get another five years on top of your original five-year ban for non-disclosure? The fourth suggested penalty is one of those “anything else we haven’t quite thought of yet” clauses. Clearly, though, if these suggested penalties had already been in effect Gibbs and Williams would be serving far longer bans than their six months. In the meantime, Cronje, who in the South African context is the real villain of the piece, continues to maintain his “I only made a mistake and lots of people have already forgiven me” position as South Africa and the ICC try to untangle an increasingly complicated mess.