Well SA didn't have any upcoming series for a start when the scandal broke in April 2000 - SA didn't play again until August. And in particular they didn't have any evidence that there was future fixes in the wings. Here however, this betting guy's claiming that there are a couple of the Eng-Pak ODIs ready to be fixed. Common sense says that straight away those ODIs should be cancelled if there is any weight put in the claims. And I'd be cancelling any Pakistan cricket until they find out who exactly is involved.
That is also the difference from the Cronje/South Africa tale. Cronje was the only guy who'd been implicated by the bookies. It was he himself who had drawn other players like Gibbs into the scam. So by getting rid of Cronje then the links with the bookies were severed. This time it's different because Salman, Kamran, Amir and Asif have all been implicated - not just one man. So all 4 have to go and maybe others if more names get mentioned in investigations. That's why it may be easier just to temporarily suspend any Pakistan cricket until they get a better grip on who might be invovled. Otherwise any games they play will have questions over them and will be hard for viewers, fans etc to take seriously.
Well because Azharuddin, Cronje and also Saleem Malik were deemed to be the ones who had gone along with the bookies and had tried to influence others into taking cash too. Whereas Gibbs took cash yes, but never went through with his deal: to score less than 20 - he scored 70 odd from memory. So that's why he got 6mths only, because he was too timid to actually do it. Who knows why though... Maybe he couldn't say no to Hansie's face, maybe he wanted to think about it or maybe he was planning to do it all along but he either got hit by a wave of consciousness or he got carried away in the middle. He probably got off a little easily if I'd been deciding. Maybe a year or 2 out of the game would have been better, but he certainly wasn't as involved as Cronje was - nowhere near. Same for Mark Waugh, he should have been given a suspension too, but more for his stupidity, not for deliberately bringing the game into disrepute like Cronje, Azha and Malik did.
So given that according to the article, Amir has had clear dealings with a fixer directly and has actually gone through with the fixes, then he's going to be in a lot more trouble than Gibbs who never saw the bookie and didn't go through with it.
