Cronje had hinted bookies' approach earlier: Bacher

LONDON, MAY 16. South African cricket boss Ali Bacher has said that a few weeks before the Delhi police registered a case against Hansie Cronje for alleged match-fixing, the sacked skipper had provided the first hint of his involvement with Indian bookies in a telephone conversation.

``Some two or three weeks before the story from Delhi broke, Hansie, in the middle of a telephone conversation about something else, said to me that the team had been approached by Indian bookies to throw a match and it had turned it down,'' Bacher was quoted as saying by Daily Telegraph on Tuesday.

``He spoke about it for no more than 30 seconds and I thought no more about it,'' Bacher said. Bacher has made this conversation with Cronje public and it will no doubt form part of the evidence he gives when Judge Edwin King begins his hearing into the Cronje affair in Cape Town at the beginning of June, according to the report. Bacher denied claims that former South African coach Bob Woolmer, had warned him about attempts by Indian bookmakers to bribe their players. ``I have no recollection of Bob ever telling me any approach had been made by Indian bookies to bribe our players.''

Woolmer, writing in The Telegraph stated last week how in 1996 he was called to a team meeting in India where his players were discussing an offer by Indian bookies which was subsequently turned down.

- PTI

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