As England’s batsmen carefully negotiated the opening day of the third Test in Port Elizabeth on Thursday, many people in the cricket world were casting their minds back 20 years to another Test in South Africa.
The fifth Test at Centurion in 2000, which ended on January 18 with an exciting narrow England win, was celebrated at the time for its wonderful spirit before the shroud of match-fixing was lifted to reveal cancer of corruption at the heart of the game.
“It was false, it was fake,” Mark Butcher, who opened the batting for England in that game, told TalkSport.
It was a Test that marked the beginning of the end for Hansie Cronje, the South African captain, whose new leather jacket – a reward from his bookmaker friend Marlon Arenstam for fixing the outcome of the Test – became for a while the most famous in world sport.
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