First published in 2017

One night in the early winter of 2000, with the Hansie Cronje match-fixing scandal moving inexorably towards revelation, Bloemfontein’s lights went out. In an effort to escape the media scrum outside his parents’ house, Cronje had sought refuge across town, and, as the power failed, he assumed the people to whom he owed money were coming to get him. “We were all at the house of a friend, Louise Kloppers, when the blackout happened,” remembers his sister, Hester. “Hansie dived underneath a couch – he thought this was it, his life was in danger. Louise, Berta [Hansie’s wife] and I couldn’t stop laughing, we thought it was so funny. When the lights came back on and Hansie stood up, he was drenched in sweat. He definitely didn’t see the funny side. I don’t think he really forgave us.”

As the scandal broke in April 2000, Cronje was a man under siege. Over the course of several years he’d been reeled in by the bookies, his casual acceptance of their sometimes extravagant gifts giving way to an increasingly fraught relationship. With the revelations moving from denial to begrudging acceptance and, finally, a sort of grovelling apology in front of the King Commission, Cronje was suddenly a frightened man. Former friends scuttled away; the cricket administrators quickly distanced themselves. He was only 30 and his cricket career was over.

After initially making a fierce denial, Cronje later confessed to taking “easy money” from Indian bookmakers, although he maintained he never fixed a match, and his contract was terminated by the South African board in April 2000. He also admitted to implicating younger members of the side – namely Herschelle Gibbs, Henry Williams and Pieter Strydom – in his nefarious activities. As a national icon for the new South Africa, and a devout Christian who had been held up as a paragon of virtue, Cronje’s fall from grace was truly shocking and it left the country reeling.

On South Africa’s tour of India and Sharjah in March 2000, Cronje had been badgered to the point of breakdown by the bookies, taking between 50 and 60 calls a day, sometimes on mobile phones they provided. The favoured son of a white minority which had ceded power to the ANC at South Africa’s first non-racial elections in 1994, Cronje was now the object of international media scrutiny not seen since those very elections. Boiling with emotions ranging from anger to swaggering self-righteousness, South Africa couldn’t get enough of the saga. In the early stages of the fandango, even the normally sober Simon Wilde of the Sunday Times was inspired to write: “This is either cricket’s biggest crisis since Bodyline or a hoax to rival that of the Hitler Diaries.”