The long walk to the depths of despair

Sometime late last year Hansie Cronje began to walk away from South African cricket. In the long shadow cast by losing a World Cup semifinal in excruciating circumstances, Cronje began, imperceptibly at first, to pound out the path of his disaffection.

He was known, for instance, to be "insecure" about the fact that he had been effectively placed on probation at the start of the 1999/2000 season, only being given the captaincy for two Tests against Zimbabwe and until the end of the second Test against England.

In November, Rushdie Magiet, Peter Pollock's successor as the convenor of national selectors, extended his tenure until the end of the season but the damage had already been done.

So irked was Cronje by his treatment at the hands of the national selectors that, after being approached by Mike Fatkin of the Glamorgan County Cricket club in September, he pursued what was to turn out to be an ill-fated two-year coaching offer from the club, a venture which further soured his relationship with the architects of transformation on Corlett Drive.

Cronje's bout of brinkmanship was compounded by the fact that he was economical with the truth on two counts when it came to the Glamorgan offer.

On the one hand he was accused of not telling Fatkin about South Africa's planned tour to Sri Lanka in July and August, a state of affairs that would have threatened his contract with Glamorgan; on the other, United Cricket Board (UCB) managing director, Ali Bacher, was left to hear about Cronje's Welsh flirtation on national television despite the fact that he and Cronje had sat next to each other at a function two nights before.

After an hour-long meeting with Bacher on October 12, however, the damage appeared to have been temporarily repaired. There was clearly much to discuss - Cronje had a similar discussion with Magiet at roughly the same time - with Cronje leaving the meeting set on avenging South Africa's 2-1 away defeat to England in the South African winter of 1998.

Yet many of the conditions that bothered Cronje were still in place.

Kepler Wessels, a man who has appeared to know significantly more than he has cared to admit throughout the Cronje scandal, used his newspaper column on at least one occasion to throw doubt on Cronje's pedigree.

Given that Wessels is also a national selector, Cronje might reasonably have drawn attention to the ethical delicacy of Wessels's position, pointing out that selection meetings are closed affairs, and for Wessels to even give the public a glimpse of his selectorial thinking in his columns is to have taken unfair advantage of his role.

Neither can Cronje have failed to take note of the brouhaha surrounding the initial selection of an all-white Northerns/Gauteng invitation side to play England at Centurion Park in a match ludicrously billed as the "sixth Test" immediately prior to the start of the Test series.

As the UCB's then president, Ray White, frantically tried to douse the public relations disaster, Walter Masimula, a black fast-bowler from Gauteng, was drafted into the side at the eleventh hour.

There was nonetheless a widespread feeling that the UCB had violated the ethos of its own philosophy by either helping, informally, to select the side or countenancing the original selection.

Fringe Test candidates such as Nic Pothas, Greg Smith, Neil McKenzie and Clive Eksteen were given a run, however, as purely cricketing criteria appeared to win the day over the far murkier criteria of affirmative selection.

Quite when things unravelled still further for Cronje is unclear. Despite having the advantage of bowling first against England in the Wanderers Test, Cronje must have been buoyed by South Africa's victory, secured before lunch on the Sunday.

Clearly, though, a 2-1 series win against England was not enough, as Cronje this week admitted that during the subsequent one-day triangular series against England and Zimbabwe he received money to impart information to a bookmaker.

Given Cronje's admission, the fifth Test against England at Centurion Park in late January in which Cronje and Nasser Hussain fashioned a result out of hopeless circumstances, must now also be viewed with suspicion.

Knowing he already had the series in the bag Cronje possibly allowed himself to be out-manoeuvred by Hussain; at the same time, Cronje was more than generous in the number of overs he gave the England captain to chase South Africa's total - a rate of less than 3,5 runs per over.

It has been a sad, heart-wrenching and embarrassing week for many South Africans, a week during which many of the myths so assiduously stoked by the UCB since the death of apartheid have come tumbling down.

Cronje, as now seems obvious, was increasingly alienated from the perpetual balancing act undertaken by the UCB as it attempted to usher in change on the one hand without distancing its traditional constituencies on the other.

Quite what led Cronje to embark on such an ill-conceived venture might never become clear but there is an element of self-sacrifice, of radical disaffection and schoolboy hostility about it all. The UCB clearly knew about these things - they cannot, however, have predicted the lengths to which their national captain was prepared to go in demonstrating that he did not share their vision.

Surely Cronje cannot have imparted information because he needed the money? Was it simply a case then of his hubris, of, in an unguarded moment, failing to think through the moral implications of conveying information.

Or was it more mundane - the disaffection theory falling by the wayside for a moment - as Cronje offered something he thought was innocuous as he realised only later what the full impact of his disclosure might have been?

For my part, as one who sat at the next table during breakfast and often took the same flights across India and wiled away the empty hours in airport lounges together, Cronje is personable, sensitive and easy to work with.

He was always careful to guard his distance but that can be put down to his emotional enforcement of the necessary boundaries between players and the press.

There was no inkling of the currents behind the scenes; I might have been there but, paradoxically, I was no closer to knowledge than those stunned cricket fans across the country - the very people who feel the pity and betrayal that I do now.