Ever since mid-day’s Clayton Murzello, a friend of many years, reminded me that the match-fixing scandal broke exactly 25 years ago and asked me if I could revisit those days for this paper, memories have been flooding my mind. Emotions that disturb the equilibrium of a human being — trauma, fear, anxiety, tension, shock, anger, helplessness, pain — had been enough to rip apart the mental health of a cricket fan. 

The horror that was unfolding on TV screens on the evening of April 7, 2000 was unbelievable. One of the most respected figures of world cricket, the South African skipper Hansie Cronje, along with four teammates, was being charged with match-fixing by the Delhi police. The accusation was that in the one-day series played a month earlier in India, the South Africans had “participated in the conspiracy to fix the matches in consideration of money.” The police filed “a case FIR 111 of cheating, fraud and criminal conspiracy at PS Chanakyapuri.”