Sport on TV: Sound of leather jacket on tear-stained pillow

Tag : White Leather Jacket


The England cricket team have to be whiter than white these days,by the look of their new outfits. It's a good job, too, because thegrey skies that hang over this country mean they are not easy tosee. But a cloud has hung over the game ever since South Africa'scaptain Hansie Cronje picked up the phone at 3am, broke down andconfessed to match-fixing.
As an icon of the post-apartheid era who should have been acutelyconscious of colour, alas when Cronje looked at the new RainbowRepublic all he saw was the pot of gold at the end of it. And 'NotCricket: The Bookmaker and The Captain' (BBC4, Monday) stressedthat when he approached his team-mates to help him fix a one-dayinternational in India, he went after two of the first non-whiteplayers to represent South Africa, Herschelle Gibbs and HenryWilliams.
The tragedy in the story was not so much that cricket was bent, butthat a dream had died. The world had eagerly awaited the return ofSouth Africa to the sporting fold. Cronje had singlehandedly ruinedit, like someone spiking the punch at the launch party.
The extent of Cronje's betrayal was highlighted by an earlierprogramme in the BBC's Cricket Legends series, 'The BasilD'Oliveira Conspiracy', which was shown on the same night. It toldthe epic tale of a supremely talented "Cape Coloured" cricketer whocame to England to express himself on a level playing field withthe white man, and how that brave journey was compromised when thechiefs of English cricket bowed to South African demands that heshould not tour the country of his birth as an England player. Thetour was cancelled, and so began 20 years of sporting isolation.
It was Cronje who was supposed to lead them out of the wilderness,but he loved money too much. There is something biblical about thesimplicity of this parable – and his death, in a lightaircraft that crashed into the side of a mountain.
With South Africa due in this country, thoughts turn to Cronje andthe Centurion Test of 2000 when, for the first time ever, Testinnings were forfeited to achieve a result from a rain-ruinedmatch. Cronje orchestrated this at the behest of Marlon Aronstam, abookmaker who "cold-called" him on his mobile phone and rewardedhim with a leather jacket. The wonder is in the detail, but thelarger picture may indicate that after Centurion, Test cricket wasnever the same.
These days there are many more results than tame draws, and thegame is played more positively. Do we have Cronje to thank forthat? And how about the Twenty20 revolution? Aronstam said fixingwould continue until "players received the right remuneration". TheIndian Premier League may have solved that problem, but theproliferation of this latest form of the game is even more of abookies' dream.
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