Let's look beyond Hansie Cronje

Betting is betting when you are playing for your country, what form it takes is a matter of indifference to the viewer. The way the South Africans rooted for Cronje even after it became blatantly known that he was patently guilty of bribe-taking is astonishing, writes RAJU BHARATAN.

SAMUEL BECKETT summed up the sorry situation succinctly when he observed: ``There is no returning game between a man and his stars.'' So let us disabuse our cricket perspective of this not- so-magnificent obsession with Hansie Cronje. Let us dismiss the man and his manipulations from our mindset by leaving Hansie Cronje to the fate chalked out, for him, by William Ernest Henley - ``It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.''

The soul-searching must go on. The game must go on. For this, it is imperative that we grow progressively dismissive of Hansie Cronje and the calibre of individual he now represents. The game is greater than the individual. And what is Hansie Cronje going to be, in the grand sum, if not a speck in the glorious history of the game? Wisden chooses its 100 Cricketers of the Century. Is there any way you can `remote- control' Hansie Cronje into the picture here? The man is but another utility cricketer who has come and gone, tried to damage the game beyond repair - and failed.

I say this with all the seasoning of the game at my command. It distressed me to see the supercilious manner in which Christianity was invoked into the picture. What happened between Hansie Cronje and his pastor was a strictly personal matter. To me, Christianity is relevant, in this game, only when a Brian Booth, while on the way to a great career for Australia as a willowy virtuoso, walks out of the game, because it involves playing cricket on a Sunday during a tour of England. It went against the church-going-day grain for Brian Booth to play cricket on a Sunday and I admired him for his high integrity in giving up the game altogether - if it meant performing on the one day of the week reserved for prayer.

Likewise, the Rt. Rev. David Sheppard demonstrated to us what true Christianity meant vis-a-vis cricket. David Sheppard was on the threshold of a flourishing cricket career, as I saw him perform for Cambridge University and then opening for England with Len Hutton (86) to hit a highly cultured 119 on August 14, 1952, vs Vijay Hazare's India in the fourth and final Test at The Oval. In terms of class and potential, David Sheppard, that day, lagged no way behind Peter May in stroke selection and stroke production. Yet, in one memorable `stroke', he moved away from the game altogether - to become the Rev. David Sheppard. ``There aren't many people in England, today, prepared to devote all their time to the church, you know,'' a die-hard Sussex-watcher told me. ``We in England will miss David Sheppard there in the middle, yet I appreciate his singular devotion to The Cause.''

There are those who will dismiss me as a romantic - a viewer out of tune with the temper and tempo of the times - for drawing such pointed attention to the examples of David Sheppard and Brian Booth in 2000 A.D. Yet envision Brian Booth in the second innings of the October 1964 Brabourne Stadium Test between Bobby Simpson's Australia and Nawab of Pataudi's (Jr) India. Booth then was the picture of grace and poise, batting on 74. This was when he danced down the wicket to hit Bapu Nadkarni, missed and turned to see the wicket-keeper stumping him. Brian Booth just walked, though Indrajitsinhji had stumped him without the ball in his gloves! Booth left such matters to the conscience of the Indrajitsinhjis of this world. If not Indrajitsinhji, at least Pataudi should have called back Booth. But it did not happen and Booth just departed, leaving the Indian wicket-keeper and his captain to search their souls. There has now been similar talk of Hansie Cronje's conscience pricking him. Where Hansie Cronje is different from Brian Booth is in that his conscience seems to have pricked him only for a while! Within hours, Hansie Cronje was back on the monitor, denying the whole thing, drawing a dubiously delicate distinction between spread-betting and match- fixing.

This is another aspect of white thinking that has astonished the brown and the black world alike. Betting is betting when you are playing for your country, what form it takes is a matter of supreme indifference to the viewer. The way South Africa rooted for Hansie Cronje even after it became blatantly known that he was patently guilty of bribe-taking astonished us Asians. But then this was the Proteas' own personalised trauma and they were, perhaps, only just beginning to learn to live with it. That is the most charitable construction we could put on the matter from this distance.

No less taken aback were we by the spectacle of Shaun Pollock dedicating South Africa's 2-1 win, over Steve Waugh's Australia, ``to our own Hansie''. We can here, yet again, only conclude that the shell-shocked Proteas were then still coming to terms with their conscience. Yet there was something great for the game that the one-day series between South Africa and Australia did do, coming so close on the heels of Hansie's turning out to be a heel. It restored, at least in part, our faith in cricket as a game. There was this theory that, after Hansie Cronje, cricket would never be the same again. The South Africa-Australia series gave the lively lie to this.

It was a closely fought series in which the Proteas managed to inch ahead only in the last lap. What agreeably surprised me was the number of India-slanted `spots' I got to view (between overs), on TV, through the three different days the series was being contested. This proved that interest in cricket abided. No matter if it was the curiosity element that attracted those spot ads. Closely did I - like others - look for evidence of some `fix' or other during those three matches of the one-day series. But found none.

For all that, one thought did strike me as a viewer - against the backdrop of the betting atmosphere in which the series came to be fought to a finish. This was whether one white nation had not baled out another by letting South Africa win the series (2-1) in a telephoto-finish.For the Hansie hangover had proved one thing - that the whites would band together, to any extent, where it came to saving their skin.

In this light - that Proteas discovered at the end of the tunnel - did Steve Waugh and his Australia let South Africa nerve- tinglingly prevail, 2-1, in an effort to save the game, not only for the white-playing nations of the world, but for the world itself? If there was any such fix, it was a positive fix. Steve Waugh had talked, with genuine concern, about how the game had moved from the back-page to the front-page of newspapers for the wrong reasons. It was obvious that Steve Waugh entertained genuine anxiety for the future of cricket as a spectator sport. In the process, if he and his men did let South Africa narrowly win, so be it - only cricket was the gainer.

Mind you, I am not suggesting this happened, only wondering. There are times when a captain has to go beyond the game - if he is to go beyond Hansie Cronje. And Steve Waugh might have done just that - and no more - to safeguard the game for generations to come. If Steve did do something like that, I see nothing basically wrong. The motivation for me to loud-think, along these expedient lines, arises from Steve Waugh and his men's not really seeming to feel the pinch about losing 1-2. It just isn't like the Ugly Aussie to not hate losing. But then the circumstances were extenuating, weren't they?

If Australia did indeed so let South Africa win, it took but the first timely step in moving beyond Hansie Cronje. For my part, I have no doubt that, by the end of the century (December 2000 A.D.), we are going to see the game purged of, virtually, all pernicious influence eating into its vitals. In fact, I felt I viewed the positive side of the game assert itself in the South Africa-Australia one-day series itself. Looking to the setting in which those three matches came to be played, one would have expected viewers to be sceptical of each single move by every other player on the field. But nothing of the kind happened. Yes, we did fall to reflecting if Herschelle Gibbs was going on failing with the bat because of what that transcript had to reveal. But the feeling, happily, was transient.

To be sure, such doubts will creep in afresh, every now and then, as India resumes one-day cricket combat, at Dhaka, on May 31. As Pakistan, too, will be in the fray, the Jonahs and the Jeremiahs will have the speculating field all to themselves. But for how long? In fact, if we viewers are going to query the performing bona fides of cricketers, all along the line, starting May 30, what about pausing, in all conscience, to think of the state of mind in which the players, in the tournament, will be approaching the series? The very fact that each single move of theirs is going to be watched with an eagle eye and put under the microscope is going to make the players `nervy' enough to lead to human mistake after human mistake - batting, bowling and fielding. But these - I, as a viewer, am very hopeful - will soon be accepted for the genuine performing mistakes they are. Viewers are not myopic fools. They know that such doubts can be persistently raised only up to a point. If Authority is seen, by May end, as moving in a positive direction about sweeping the game clean, the viewership, the spectatorship, too, will come back, reasoned and reasoning.

The lunatic fringe, of course, will always be there, reading malevolent meaning into every single action on the field. But the thinking viewer will go along with Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi in the submission that ``cricket, after all, is only a game, not war''.

The short point I seek to make is that the small screen is not the larger-than-life 35-mm silver screen. On the small screen, there is no game if, like on the 35-mm screen, you bring in `suspension of disbelief' all the time. And `suspension of disbelief' is what `suspension of belief' will degenerate into if we, as viewers, question every single action-replay on the monitor. Such a tortuous thought-process could only prove mentally self-defeating. Once the cleansing of the Augean stables is complete, telly viewing is going to be a matter of faith.

Telly speculation was rife only because cricket mentors - until beginning-April 2000 - were viewed to be doing nothing, just nothing, about setting the wagering focus, on the screen, right. Now that cricket administrators have realised that their own chairs are `musical', be sure that something will be done to set matters right. Let this clean-up job go on.

Let us viewers, meanwhile, learn to be rational about it all. The inherent vitality, the intrinsic dynamism, of cricket is such that it is beyond the powers of one Hansie Cronje to destroy it. Cricket's hour of peril is its hour of hope.

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