On the admissions he has now made, Hansie Cronje must be officially banned from playing any form of representative cricket. He has been dropped as captain and player for South Africa for the one-day series against Australia. But this punishment needs the reinforcement of an unequivocal statement by the South African Cricket Board that he is to be banished from the game. Part of Cronje's dishonesty has been his attempt to gloss over his unpardonable behaviour. But this is misleading, and the United Cricket Board of South Africa, unfortunately, has winked too long at this exercise in semantics.
Most people understand match-fixing to mean contriving a result in the bookmakers' favour.
But the Indian tapes, which gave rise to the allegations against Cronje, show the bookmakers are more interested in individual outcomes, a form of player-fixing. The tapes, of course, have yet to be authenticated. But they are now being taken seriously, as providing an insight into how bookmakers corrupt players. Crucially, the tapes show it is not so much the result that interests the bookmakers as much as fixing individual players' performances, such as batsmen's scores. There is method in this.