Cronje cashes in with SA under fire

It might not yet have occurred to Hansie Cronje, as he stashes away the cash from his latest round of interviews, but it is possible that he could still emerge as the man who plunged cricket into its gravest constitutional crisis since apartheid forced South Africa into isolation 30 years ago.

No word yet has been given by either M-Net or SuperSport regarding the amount paid to Cronje for the three-part interview screened last week, or indeed, whether he was paid at all. A source at M-Net this week, however, suggested that a figure of R1-million might not be wildly off the mark. This, of course, stands in marked contrast to the six-month bans and fines imposed on Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams this week who were guilty, mostly, of listening to their captain.

There has been furious debate over the severity or otherwise of these sentences. The real issue, though, is whether the International Cricket Council accepts the punishments. If not then international cricket and the South African game could find themselves facing up against each other in an irreconcilable Mexican standoff.

Following the announcement of the punishments on Monday, the full 26-page disciplinary report was faxed off to the ICC. It has been passed on to Lord Griffiths, the chairman of the ICC code of conduct committee. Lord Griffiths, or the ICC, whichever way you choose to see it, 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. Indeed, it is difficult to find any legal system that would allow this.

In other words, 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 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.

The official 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, has already criticised the sentences as being too lenient.

"It is correct the International Cricket Council's code of conduct commissioner Lord Griffiths can review the decision and veto it. We expect that will happen," Doig told CricInfo this week, also claiming that this view was backed by NZC chairman Sir John Anderson.

In the wake of Charles Dempsey, South Africans may wonder what grounds New Zealand has to be sanctimonious about anything, but the fact is that not everyone outside South Africa accepts the sentences as appropriate. Australia, almost certainly, are unlikely to challenge another country's handling of a match-fixing issue. After covering up the Mark Waugh-Shane Warne affair, and being found out, the Australian Cricket Board is hardly in a position to stand in judgement on anyone else.

But Pakistan were upset by 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.

UCB president Percy Sonn acknowledged this week 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.

If this were to happen, there would be no little irony in the fact that the man who benefited most from South Africa's readmission, in personal, financial and cricketing terms, was directly responsible for a further period of isolation.

At the same time, 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. If you visit the ICC website you will see a notice advising that e-mail queries cannot be responded to. It is possible that around last October the resources at the ICC offices at Lord's did not stretch to a fax machine.

Whatever the case, it seems an instance of gross inefficiency and this maladministration left the disciplinary committee not bound by the penalties. 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 being made to plug the loopholes. Four new penalties covering match-fixing offences has 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 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 that 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 current 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.