Hansie Cronje..

Wessel Johannes "Hansie" Cronje was a South African cricketer and captain of the South African national cricket team in the 1990s. He was voted the 11th greatest South African in 2004 despite having been banned for life from professional cricket for his role in a match-fixing scandal.

He had made his debut at 18 in January 1988, joining his brother, Frans, for the Currie Cup games against Transvaal and Northern Transvaal. Innings of two and 16, then a pair, were an inauspicious start for someone who would notch up a record 15 first-class hundreds for the Free State, as well as six in one-day competitions. The following season, his unbeaten 105 against Impalas took Orange Free State into the Benson and Hedges Trophy final, where Frans's old school-friend Allan Donald blew Western Province aside with four for 18. Hansie's maiden first-class hundred followed in January 1990 when, captaining South African Universities, he hit 104 against Mike Gatting's English rebels.

At first he had hotly denied charges levelled by the New Delhi police, who during a phone-tapping operation in March 2000 heard him conspiring with an Indian bookmaker, Sanjeev Chawla, to predetermine performances. And such was his standing as a player, captain and sporting ambassador for post-apartheid South Africa that few in the cricket world doubted him, preferring to heap scorn on the Indian investigation.

Ali Bacher, managing director of the United Cricket Board of South Africa, spoke of Cronje's "unquestionable integrity and honesty". Then, four days after the accusation, Cronje confessed in a 3 a.m. phone call to Bacher that he had not been "entirely honest". He was immediately stripped of the captaincy, as his side prepared for a oneday series against Australia, and in subsequent testimony to the government-appointed King Commission revealed, sometimes in tears, further details of his involvement with bookmakers in match-fixing. The cricket world listened agog as much as aghast. The game's reputation, it seemed, was at an all-time low. Cronje's life and career were in tatters.

Cronje's appeal against his life ban was rejected by the Pretoria High Court in October 2001, and while there was talk of his having some future role in cricket, maybe coaching or in the media, he began to build a life away from the game. He enrolled on a Masters Degree course, and in February 2002 joined the Johannesburgbased firm Bell Equipment, which specialised in earth-moving machinery, as financial manager. At the time of his death he was commuting weekly to and from his home on the exclusive Fancourt Estate in George. That fateful weekend, he had hitched a ride with the two pilots of an Air Quarius Hawker Siddeley turboprop after his scheduled flight had been grounded by a hailstorm - a risk-taker to the end. More than a thousand mourners filled the Grey College Chapel for Cronje's funeral, while a thousand more outside watched the service, which was televised nationally, on large screens. It was reported that members of the UCBSA, critical earlier of their captain's betrayal, had been told they would not be welcome, but Bertha Cronje, Hansie's widow, said he would not have agreed with such a ban. The divisions were forgotten as South Africa, a nation rebuilding on forgiveness and reconciliation, mourned, in Gary Kirsten's words, "a great cricketer, a great performer and a great on-field leader of his country". It was elsewhere that cricket would still consider Hansie Cronje a tarnished hero.