ICC has stepped up the fight but the proliferation of franchise cricket has made the job of stopping corruption even harder

It was, almost everyone agreed, a deft and handsome bit of cricket. Twenty years ago this week, on the fifth day of a dead Test spoiled by three days of rain, Hansie Cronje made an irresistible offer to England’s Nasser Hussain. South Africa, he said, would declare on 248 a half hour before lunch, both teams would forfeit an innings, and England would have the rest of the day to try and win the game. They did, by two wickets.

“I hope Hansie gets the credit he deserves,” Hussain said later. He did. It was “a refreshing, populist gesture” in one paper, “a triumph for all too rare positive thinking” in another, “brave, positive, and brilliant” in a third.

Some grumbled Cronje had devalued the sport or that he was only doing it to make himself look good. “It might raise a few eyebrows,” Cronje said after it was over.

Woakes, Archer and Wood bowl off for spot in Test team, says Collingwood Read more

He was right. At Lord’s, where the ICC had its headquarters, there were whispers that it was against the spirit of cricket. “Traditionalists muttered about interfering with the natural course of a Test match,” reported the Guardian.

How perfectly absurd, in hindsight, that the authorities were so obsessed with the threat of this speck on the game’s reputation and so oblivious to the enormous stain splashed across it.

The bookies knew better. “In Bombay,” the Guardian added, “the bookmakers cried ‘foul’ and ‘fix’ and suspended their betting.” The last people to know what was really going on that day, then, were the rest of us – the fans, press, players, and administrators.

Three months later the truth started to leak out, when Delhi police revealed they had recordings of Cronje conspiring to fix matches with an Indian bookmaker. Three months after that, Cronje confessed his guilt. He had sold that match for £5,000 and a leather jacket, and aspects of others, one-day games in India mainly, for much more.

Three months after that he was banned from the game for life. The two teammates he had corrupted, Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams, were banned for four months. It should have been a turning point in the history of the game, which ought never to have been so innocent again because it was already clear that Cronje wasn’t the only one at it. In May that year, the Qayyum report into fixing was published in Pakistan, with Saleem Malik and Ata-ur-Rehman banned for life and six more fined. In December, when the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation completed its own investigation, Mohammad Azharuddin and Ajay Sharma were banned for life and Ajay Jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar were banned for five years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Herschelle Gibbs received a four-month ban. Photograph: Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi/REUTERS

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Every one of those bans was overturned, which only added to everyone’s confusion about who was guilty of what.

As for Cronje, he died in a plane crash in 2002 and his reputation will remain, now, frozen forever in the balance. Amazingly, in 2004 he finished 11th in a poll run by the South African Broadcasting Corporation to find the 100 greatest South Africans. The public were, perhaps, at a moment in their history when they were more inclined to forgiveness than many of us might be. They accepted his religiosity (“In a moment of stupidity and weakness,” Cronje said. “I allowed Satan to dictate terms to me rather than the Lord”) as a sign of sincere repentance rather than rampant hypocrisy.

“To those who are disappointed with their fallen heroes,” wrote Qayyum, “it be suggested that humans are fallible. Cricketers are only cricketers.”

Cronje was something more than that, though. He was a charismatic man, a convincing leader and an emblem of the new South Africa. Someone who inspired such enormous loyalty in his friends and teammates that one of them, Daryll Cullinan, testified with one breath that Cronje had offered the team $250,000 to throw a match and, with his next breath, testified that he still thought of him “as a great captain and a great leader”. There are still Hansie Cronje fan groups on social media.

The ripples have only just stopped running outwards. The bookie involved in the Cronje case, Sanjeev Chawla, was finally extradited from England to India last February, after a three-year legal wrangle. He had been lying low, living in a mock Tudor mansion in north London.

Meanwhile, the sport soon returned to sleepy innocence. In June 2000, the ICC announced it was hiring the former Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Condon to run a new anti-corruption unit. They were hopelessly under‑resourced and largely ineffective. So the more things changed, the more stayed the same.

The Spin: sign up and get our weekly cricket email.

In 2010 – another ignominious anniversary will fall this summer – the News of the World exposed another spot-fixing ring, between Salman Butt, Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif. The game went through the same cycle of shock, recrimination, and reform all over again.

It was only in the years after that the ICC began to properly resource it’s Anti-Corruption Unit. Today, the ACU is doing good work and their player education programme, in particular, is paying off. The trouble is that in the meantime, their job has become far harder as all those T20 leagues have sprouted around the world and fixers have switched from elite men’s cricket to other targets such as franchise cricket, youth cricket and women’s cricket, where there is less scrutiny and fewer financial rewards for the players.

In Cronje’s day, the problem was in plain sight. The suspicion now is that it is hidden away. We didn’t see it clearly then, we still don’t today.