Marlon steals the show

And then there was Marlon Aronstam. Throughout the first three weeks of the King commission light relief has been in short supply, but it arrived on Friday in the stocky shape of the Johannesburg bookmaker, a man built like a nightclub bouncer and who dresses like a spiv.

At one point Aronstam looked as if he might not make it into the witness box. At the end of his cross-examination there were tears from Hansie Cronje and, as if in sympathy, Aronstam promptly broke down too. He needed an adjournment to compose himself before he'd said a word in evidence.

But once he got going, he proved well-nigh impossible to stop. The gist of what Aronstam told the commission was that the R53 000 and leather jacket he had given to Cronje after the Centurion Park Test match was not a payment for services rendered, but rather a down payment on pitch and weather reports Cronje had agreed to provide him during the triangular one-day series which followed the fifth Test.

More importantly, Aronstam revealed that within an hour of meeting Cronje personally for the first time in Cronje's Sandton Sun hotel room, the former captain had told him he was willing to throw an international match.

Cronje qualified this by saying South Africa had to have secured a place in the final, but he named Nicky Boje, Pieter Strydom and Herschelle Gibbs as already being in his pocket. Aronstam was amazed and excited. When he finally left Cronje, on the night of the fourth day of the Test he got onto his car phone and called his friends.

You'll never believe what's just happened to me, he told them, the South African captain's just told me he's willing to chuck matches.

Aronstam proved an amazing witness. "I'm not a shy person in life," he told the commission and promptly went on to demonstrate the point.

He'd phoned Cronje out of the blue during the fourth day of the Test to suggest a declaration and the forfeiture of innings. He remembered it happening during a South Africa provincial game and he'd also heard of matches in England contriving results.

Aronstam's bravado won him an audience with Cronje that night. At times, during his evidence, Aronstam backtracked and shot off on digressions, but he made it perfectly clear what he had in mind when he went to see Cronje. "I wanted to make money," he said.

Aronstam told Cronje his image needed beefing up and unveiled his proposal. If Cronje agreed, he'd donate R200 000 to a charity of Cronje's choice. He intended to make between R3-500 000 on bets as a result of the declaration, only to find that all bets on the match were off.

But as he was leaving Cronje's room, the captain asked him how he could make some money out of cricket. "The ball's in your court," he told Cronje, at which point Cronje said that a few players were needed to chuck a game before naming Gibbs, Boje and Strydom as possible conspirators.

Two days later he presented Cronje with a first payment of R30 000, and followed it with R20 000 a day later. These payments, Aronstam insisted, were not for Centurion Park, but for pitch and weather reports duly supplied by Cronje. "They were worth every cent," claimed Aronstam.

To hear Aronstam tell it, he was entirely responsible for England's two-wicket win at Centurion Park. The notion that Cronje might well have come up with the idea by himself simply hadn't occurred to him. Aronstam, though, was clearly delighted to have the ear of the South African captain, and all he initially got in return for his involvement was a jersey signed by the South African players.

It is also clear, though, that Aronstam believed the pitch reports supplied by Cronje were worth their weight in gold. And as much as John Dickerson, for Cronje, tried to pin him down, as quick was Aronstam to wriggle away.

At one point, when Dickerson put it to him that R30 000 was a lot of money, Aronstam responded by asking "How much are you guys earning a day?" A short while later a conspiratorial glint crossed Aronstam's face. He leaned forward and spoke into the back of his hand: "Off the record ..." he said.

For all his tears and grandstanding, though, Aronstam managed to portray his "champion" and "hero" as a man almost totally corrupted, an impression already given by Cronje during the final stages of his cross-examination.

Cronje was simply unable to explain how he had agreed a figure of $25 000 each with Sanjay for Gibbs and Williams and then offered his former team-mates only $15 000 apiece to help him throw the last one-day international in India this year. Eventually he was forced to concede that perhaps he had been looking to keep a cut of their money for himself.

There was one new piece of evidence to emerge. This concerned the figure he had discussed with Sanjay for throwing one of the ODIs during the triangular series in South Africa also involving England and Zimbabwe. The cost for a South Africa defeat, apparently, was $100 000. Of course, how much of this Cronje would have kept for himself we may never know.