Hansie's bookie tells CricInfo he wants to clean up cricket

"What is wrong providing a man is playing to the best of his ability? Everybody is moaning about what Alec Stewart was doing in 1993, but it was not even classified by ICC at that stage as doing anything wrong."

It is true that the International Cricket Council's Code of Conduct Commission did not specifically ban the passing of such information for money until March 1999. Until then, it was only a general "bringing the game into disrepute" clause that would have covered actions of this type. Now, however, the Players' Declaration, to be signed by every international player and submitted to Sir Paul Condon as Director of the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit, includes the following question:

"Have you for personal reward or for some other person's benefit agreed, or been approached, to give information concerning the weather, the ground, Team selection, the toss or the outcome of any match or any event in the course of a match other than to a newspaper or broadcaster and disclosed in advance to your Board?"

Despite Aronstam's protestations to the contrary, it is easy to appreciate why the ICC should be against such dealings. There might not be an obvious problem with taking a few pounds - or even a leather jacket - for providing this type of information, but one thing can lead to another. Once the bookie has a player in his pocket, he knows that if he wants a bigger favour he can point to previous dealings and threaten to blow the whistle. With a possible five-year ban for anyone guilty of providing this type of information, the player is trapped.

Aronstam admits that scenario is possible, but does not believe a player should be castigated for a crime that might take place at a future date. Anyway, he classifies such information as sensible research. "If you know it's a terrible pitch, and you know that a team batting first scores in excess of 220, that score is competitive. If you know beforehand that it's a 270 or 280 pitch and they only score 220, they don't have enough runs. All I do is trade the position so that the pitch report helps a lot and I can make a lot more money out of it than I paid for it."

The practice has been around for some time, but as far as Aronstam is concerned, Hansie Cronje has been his only source of information. He did have an ex-player who worked for him for six months or so prior to his meeting with Cronje, but he had to terminate his association. "I decided he wasn't worth what I was paying him, because he only worked when it suited him. I wanted him to fly to Zimbabwe to look at a pitch during a Test series and he told me he was busy."

The former professional to whom Aronstam paid a monthly salary had to do no more than provide pitch reports, for he did not even help with determining the odds. That is at the centre of the bookmaker's art, but he needs the right information before he can apply the science of probability.

Had it not been for the fact that the First Test between West Indies and England was abandoned at Sabina Park in 1998 after just 56 minutes, Aronstam could have made a lot of money. "Based on what Colin Croft said about the pitch on CricInfo the day before, I went round betting on both England and the West Indies because I realised that there was very little chance of it being a draw."

In Aronstam's case, his relationship with a player would not go beyond gaining this type of information. "I wouldn't want to know from a cricketer who is going to win a match because I think they're all bad judges anyway. If you ask cricketers for advice on what to back, you've got to be stupid."

This assessment leads him to giving his reasoning behind why Cronje was exposed. "Hansie get caught because he didn't necessarily want to fix a match but he kept people on a string. After the seventh one-day international, he said they were going to lose a game, Gibbs will get out at this stage, this, this and this. When he told them to have another big bet on India and all the information he gave them never worked, they leaked information to the Indian CBI. They tipped them off just to get back at Hansie for costing them a lot of money listening to his information that never proved successful at all."

Aronstam states quite categorically that he, himself, has never tried to influence the outcome of a cricket match. "Everyone assumes that the bookmaker is the villain, but in the end bookmakers don't want cricket to be crooked, because they're the people liable to be set up more than anyone else."

It might not have the same ring to it as Hobbs and Sutcliffe or Greenidge and Haynes, but how about Condon and Aronstam forming a partnership to open the batting against corruption in cricket?