Please let Hansie rest in peace

Disgraced South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje was laid to rest nearly 15 years ago after being killed in an air crash in the Outeniqua mountains in the southern Cape.

But the ghosts of the fallen national sporting hero's tainted past just keep re-surfacing.

The man whom Cronje succeeded as national captain, Kepler Wessels, has gone public in an interview with Fox Sport's Cricket Legends series with a theory. He believes Cronje was involved in match-fixing long before he was eventually caught in 2000 and banned for life.

Cronje eventually admitted to taking bribes from bookmakers to influence matches since 1996 after being charged by Indian police.

 Wessels retired from the top flight game in 1994 and is now a prominent cricket commentator and analyst.

 Wessels, who also played cricket for Australia, reportedly had concerns over Cronje during a 1994 triangular series (which also included Australia and Pakistan) shortly before he called time on his own career.

 "Hansie made a few comments during the last couple of games that led me to believe that things weren’t 100 percent right," Wessels told Cricket Legends.

 "We picked up a wicket and we were in the huddle and Pakistan were 120/4 or something.

 "And (Cronje) came into the huddle and said ‘don’t worry about this. We’re going to win this one because they’re not trying to win it’." Wessels says that statement immediately struck him as odd.

That was Cronje's first ODI Series as Proteas captain.

 Wessels then described how he recalls Pakistan, chasing just 215 for victory in another ODI soon thereafter, collapsed from 101/2 to 178 all out after looking well on track for the win.

 In that collapse, which saw eight wickets fall for just 77 runs, Wessels remembers "two or three" run-outs where the ball was hit straight to star fielder, Jonty Rhodes.

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 Why is Wessels only wading through the old cobwebs 15 years later and why did he see it only now, as an opportune time to speak out? 

 Why did he not offer this information to the King Commission in what became the game's most thorough investigation into corruption and match-fixing?

Yes, Wessels is insinuating that it was merely a hunch, but would it have not been more appropriate to speak out when the scandal was still hot on the ironing board and not 15 years later. Or did Kepler just take the bait thrown out to him by the Aussie media?

 Was it really necessary for a highly respected cricket brain like Wessels to re-open some of the old wounds ?

Yes, Hansie was made an example of in the dark world of illegal sports betting and exposed the scourge of match-fixing in the game, but surely it's time to allow him to rest in peace and not subject his family to any more trauma than they already went through.

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