Cronje tops BBC Test cricket scandal poll — SkimNews
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- Hansie Cronje topped the BBC Test Match Special reader poll after the former South Africa captain admitted to match-fixing with Indian bookmakers, most infamously engineering a result in the rain-affected dead-rubber fifth Test against England at Centurion Park in 2000.
- The D'Oliveira Affair ranked second — Basil D'Oliveira's 1968 selection for England's tour of apartheid-era South Africa led to the tour being cancelled, with Jonathan Agnew calling it 'eventually the birth of a new South Africa.'
- Sandpapergate placed third: Australia's use of sandpaper on the ball during their 2018 Cape Town Test against South Africa, the most recent scandal on the list, ahead of Friday's rematch in the same country.
- Bodyline ranked fourth — England's 1932-33 Ashes intimidatory fast bowling aimed at Australian batters' bodies, which Steven Finn defended as 'entirely legitimate' use of the laws.
- Pakistan's 2010 Lord's spot-fixing came fifth, with captain Salman Butt and fast bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir jailed after deliberately bowled no-balls in a Test that Finn called 'a weird atmosphere' due to News of the World reporters in the dressing room.
- The 2006 forfeited Oval Test ranked last at tenth — umpire Darrel Hair's mid-innings ball change led Pakistan to refuse to play, and the Test was later awarded to England years after the fact.
- Cronje's conspiracy was uncovered by accident: Delhi police were trying to tap a bookmaker's phone and accidentally tapped Cronje's, according to Agnew, who said it has since made it 'much more difficult for a player to manipulate games.'
Why it matters: The poll elevates systemic and political scandals — Cronje's corruption (exposed by a police wiretap error) and D'Oliveira's role in helping dismantle apartheid — above on-field cheating incidents, even the more recent Sandpapergate, framing Australia's Cape Town return on Friday as a cultural checkpoint rather than just a sporting fixture.
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