26th October — Cronje confirms worst suspicions

October 26, 2000 by neil manthorp

No mat­ter how insin­cere he is and how many lies he tells, there will always be peo­ple who love Han­sie Cron­je. Or so it seems. 

Lawyer Les Sack­stein’s cur­rent bat­tle to over­turn the UCB’s attempts to impose a life ban on Cron­je con­firm the worst, most bit­ter cyn­i­cism from the for­mer SA cap­tain’s camp. 

It gives me no plea­sure to say this, but this col­umn sug­gest­ed a cou­ple of days ago that the UCB need­ed to put Cron­je’s self-imposed ‘ban’ in writ­ing and make it offi­cial — just in case it was hol­low rhetoric. Now we know it was.
Noth­ing Cron­je says can be tak­en at face val­ue. Noth­ing to do with crick­et, any­way. When he said that he would have noth­ing to do with crick­et dur­ing the King Com­mis­sion it was, at best, an emo­tion­al out­burst, and at worst a cyn­i­cal, cal­cu­lat­ing attempt to throw the dogs off the trail while he car­ried on the hunt. 

Free State crick­et would love to have Cron­je back in it’s ranks and every­body with­in the game in South Africa knows it. A year (or even two) lieing low and build­ing a ‘low pro­file’ was all that Cron­je was required to do before re-enter­ing the game. For a man who has made approx­i­mate­ly five mil­lion rand out of the scan­dal, forg­ing a plan to con­tin­ue his involve­ment in the game is nothing.
The Unit­ed Crick­et Board have, unfor­tu­nate­ly, made a mis­take in the way they con­duct­ed the ban, how­ev­er. With­out a hear­ing they have not fol­lowed the prin­ci­ples of nat­ur­al jus­tice — Audi alter­am partem — in oth­er words, “hear the oth­er side”. 

Per­haps Sack­stein has only chal­lenged the ban on ‘prin­ci­ple’. But don’t bet on it.