Ungentlemanly pall deepens over our game

How could it happen? How could the normally reassuringly cool Hansie Cronje fall upon his sword like this? How could a man so well acquainted with the nuances of public expectation in a country desperate for new nationalistic heroes destroy his reputation in such an unsavoury way? How can there exist the potential for the sport that we all know and love to be rocked to its foundations so easily?

To begin to identify the answers to those questions, one needs to acknowledge at the outset that cricket is far from the gentleman's game that it has purported to be for so long a period of its history. Confected ignorance of that basic reality has been inappropriate for some time now, and is particularly abhorrent in circumstances like these. Cronje's spectacular tumble from grace is, in reality, the product of cricket's headlong progression into a world in which the fixation with greed can sadly no longer support even the most apparently innocent of pastimes.

The core problem is that, against the backdrop of lucrative sponsorship deals and in an era in which television cameras have spread into virtually every pocket of the cricketing world, the imperative for countries to play increasing numbers of matches is stronger than it has ever been before. The whole cornerstone of any sport in this age is commercialisation, and cricket is no different. Money feeds and sustains an entire industry of players, administrators, commentators, and as everyone now knows - other groups beside. Moreover, money (or so we are told from time to time) elevates the standards of performance and accentuates the differences between winning and losing in such a way as to confer to the sport the greater levels of drama and excitement that spectators crave. Yet, paradoxically, it also renders many contests more meaningless and potentially more amenable to manipulation.

Within such a context indeed, it should not come as a surprise that cricketers' talents and endeavours have long been viewed favourably by those with the ability to benefit financially from them. To those with treachery etched on their minds and malice embedded in their souls, batsmen, bowlers and wicketkeepers are commodities as attractive in their own way as any others which might be bought and sold in the commercial marketplace. Anecdotal evidence which has emerged over the last decade has revealed to us that, to those who support the ethos that money is all important, no cricketer is necessarily off limits. In one form or another, a vast network of players have come, or been invited, forward to tell of their own brushes with this insidious philosophy. Names as well known as Ijaz Ahmed, Salim Malik, Wasim Akram, Mark Taylor, Mark Waugh, Tim May, Shane Warne, Danny Morrison, Greg Matthews, Adam Hollioake, Dean Jones, Chris Lewis and now Cronje, Herschelle Gibbs, Pieter Strydom and Nicky Boje can indeed all be found in chronologies of the story of attempts allegedly made to induce players to fix international matches.

Cronje is certainly by no means the first player to have his fingers burnt in this way. In this dark, crisis-ridden hour, most of us sadly suspect he will not be the last. That even a figure so universally admired for his dignity and apparent integrity (until now anyway) can be caught up in the mess only highlights how pervasive the problem has become. It underlines the horrific notion that, even for the administrators whose preoccupation it should be to ruthlessly clean up this sordid mess, there is no easy or identifiable point at which to begin. It tells us that we reached a stage at which the lure of the rand, the rupee, the pound, or the dollar has become suffocatingly intrusive. To an extent so disarming that it should sicken us all, it also illustrates that it has such a manifest potential to corrupt almost anyone associated with our sport that we can be sure that this blight upon it, this cancerous growth, has touched more players than we will ever be told. Most of all, it fundamentally emphasises the notion that we should bemoan the passing of a bygone era.