Hansie Cronje's bid to rehabilitate himself, at least in the eyes of the South African public, gathered pace on Monday as indications of a carefully-plotted strategy to diminish the effects of his life ban from cricket continued to emerge.

Cronje was banned for life by the United Cricket Board last year after admitting to accepting money from bookmakers and offering inducements to his team-mates to underperform.

He intends challenging this ban in court in September and in what seems an attempt to whip up sympathy ahead of the legal battle Cronje has started to re-emerge in public life with increasing frequency.

He has spoken at functions organised by the Charles Glass Society, an organisation with close ties to Castle Lager, the official sponsors of the South African Test side; he has written a column for Jonty Rhodes' website; and on Monday he consented to a radio interview in which he expressed contrition and remorse for his actions.

His lawyer, Leslie Sackstein, has also made it known that even if the court challenge is successful, Cronje has no intention of trying to play representative cricket. The thrust of Cronje's argument is that so far-reaching is his ban that it prevents any attempt at rehabilitation by, for example, coaching schoolchildren or club cricketers.

Cronje has claimed that while he has tried to negotiate with the UCB, this door has been shut in his face, leaving him no option other than to resort to litigation.

Whether this is actually the case is at least debatable, but his position has not been harmed by the public offerings of UCB president Percy Sonn who at one point said that Cronje should not even be allowed to play beach cricket.

The merits of Cronje's legal challenge are also a matter for debate, but it has emerged that within certain sections of the UCB there is concern that the ban will not hold up in court.

At least part of the challenge will focus on the fact that Cronje was not allowed the opportunity to make representations in mitigation, as opposed to the procedure adopted when Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams were banned for six months for their parts in the affair.

Indeed, the ban was rushed through by the UCB's general council last year at a time when the then managing director of the organisation, Ali Bacher, was en route to Nairobi for the ICC KO 2000 tournament.

If Cronje's ban is overturned on a technicality, the UCB will find itself trapped between a rock and a hard place. If it seeks to reimpose the ban by following more appropriate procedures, a substantial section of the South African public will see it as both incompetent and mean-spirited. If it softens its position on Cronje, it could incur the wrath of the International Cricket Council.

If truth be told, though, the ICC's attempts to fight match-fixing are now viewed with increasing scepticism, if not outright cynicism, in South Africa. The failure of the ICC's anti-corruption commissioner to come up with a single concrete case of corruption since his appointment has left many in South Africa convinced that Cronje has been made a handy scapegoat. The view is that Cronje has been punished for confessing his misdeeds while the denials of a host of former Test captains have simply been accepted with very little argument.

To a very great extent the Cronje case has become a battle of perceptions and public relations. And in this regard Cronje and his legal advisers seem to be well ahead of the UCB which, as far as can be ascertained, has been caught completely flat-footed by this turn of events.

With South Africa preparing itself for a major summer – tours by India and Australia sandwich a tour to Australia over Christmas and the New Year – the UCB can ill-afford to further alienate a South African public which has grown to sympathise with Cronje's plight.

As it looks at the moment, the UCB will be damned if it does something about Cronje, and damned if it doesn't.

© CricInfo