I’ve never been more disappointed in an Australian team. The underarm was a terrible situation, but it was a momentary lapse of reason by a captain under pressure. This was rotten from the start to finish, including having the most junior player in the team take the fall for it. I don’t care how good a batsman he is, Smith is finished - he won’t be able to walk onto a field anywhere without opponents being able to (rightly) mock him by having yellow tape wrapped around their fingers.
I do very little watching of sports news, but I gather that Bancroft is being banned for this test, but Smith is just going to stand down from being captain, and still play.
Is that right? Because if so -
???thefuck???
The person WHO HATCHED THE PLAN should get the greater punishment, obviously! In fact, all the people involved in this incident ought to be on a plane home right now and if that doesn’t leave them with enough substitutes to actually play, or they have to fly out a bunch of newbies who then get absolutely slaughtered by SA, well…shrug fair enough, under the circumstances.
You’ve got it backwards - Smith banned for a game, Bancroft given three demerit points (whatever that means).
And Cricket Australia might impose more.
well…good!
CA has sent Iain Roy and Pat Howard to South Africa.
The odds are that they’ll fly back with Smith and likely either Warner or Lehmann.
If Smith thought batting in India was a war of attrition he going to get a fucking shock once he gets back home.
Once back CA will sack Howard because this is the “high performance” culture he’s fostered, though the underlying symptoms way predate his appointment.
And if the above doesn’t happen then CA chief executive Sutherland will be forced out.
A couple of months ago there was a protracted contract stoush between the players and administrators, mainly over pay.
The players won that battle. They don’t hold many trump cards now.
A little shoulder touch doesn’t look so bad now, does it? 
Dead easy to get on one’s high horse around this, but the fact of the matter is that lots of players, from different countries, have been implicated in ball tampering over the years and almost all countries have been guilty of, at best, sharp practice and, at worst, outright cheating. We also now live in a culture where people jump on the internet to vent and the loudest opinions win (he says, jumping on the internet to vent). It calls to mind that phrase about motes and beams. So, for mine, it’s not worth getting too high handed here - when you point the finger, it’s always worth remembering you’ve likely got 3 more fingers pointing back at yourself.
That said, I would hope that there will be appropriate levels of punishment - the ICC punishments, at first blush, seem pretty light. The planned nature of this particular escapade warrants something a bit more than 1 match and a few demerit points (and fining of match fees - when are the ICC going to give over with this? With central contracts, barely any of the money a player gets nowadays is via his match fee, so it amounts to a barely discernible slap on the wrist). The idea that Smith and Warner are going to get lengthy bans seems unlikely to me though - Smith might well never captain Australia again, but he’s too good to be dropped from the team; I just can’t see it happening.
Speaking of high horses though, I hope this shuts the Australian team up, going on about the Spirit of Cricket and all that jazz for a good long while. One of the reasons we’re interested in this elsewhere in world cricket is the schadenfreude. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving set of blokes.
I think CA should find out the names of all the players in the leadership group that had knowledge of the plan and ban them all for life from all forms of cricket.
After the horrendous shock they will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and be reinstated. Should take only a few weeks like for the recent Russians athlete bans. But the point will be made.
He knew. Or, at least, heclearly ordered the cover-up (tuck-away?) part, after the cameras caught the initial cheating, which is just as bad, IMO.
Yes.
Safraz still includes anecdotes in his speeches on the rubber chicken circuit of his use of a bottle cap to scar the ball.
Reports are that the UK tabloids are going feral. When Stuart Broad starts harping on about breeches of ethics, etiquette and spirit of the game you know you’re getting an expert opinion.
The South African press are distinctly mild on the issue. What with a couple of strikes against their captain Faf for injudicious attempts at tampering, you have to admire their discretion.
But these roosters go to South Africa with the best bowling attack in the world and because they have a bad session Plan B is cheat? Fucking glass jaw bullies.
It isn’t just a couple of posters on a website. Never mind the talking heads.
The response from the general public and peak sporting bodies here has been incandescent.
Initially Sutherland showed his tin ear and said he was “disappointed”. Note not outraged or dismayed or ropeable, just disappointed. So he’s copped a blistering roast from key sponsors Magellan and CBA and now he’s on a plane too and sending out soothing, anodyne emails. We’ve got a royal commission into the banks and banking practices going here at the moment and they are copping a pizzling. CBA will really appreciate more flagrant cheating being associated with their brand. Cricket Australia has broadcast rights with free-to-air and Pay TV up for negotiation. They were planning on substantial boost in revenue to over $1bil but expectations are now down 30%.
Smith’s and Warners suite of sponsors are lining up to be the first to dump them. Lots of dosh floating around at the moment from the gaming industry looking for names to promote. Bye bye to that boys. And there’ll be no cushy gig on the Channel 9 commentary team post retirement.
And all of that isn’t sufficient.
It isn’t quite that bad over here, It is more bemusement than anything, the cack-handed nature of it and the attempted cover-up (does it even deserve the term “cover-up”?) is getting a good going over.
I promise though that the irony of getting Stuart Broad to comment on it is not lost on any cricket fan over here and were I the sports editor he’d be the one I’d get to comment on it too, because I like a good laugh as much as the next man.
One of the Australian sporting talking heads said the Aussies in this instance were trying to make the ball unfit for the game. For whatever reason the replacement balls in this series have shown themselves to be excellent for swing(he said the replacement balls all sit gathering dust in the same box with presumably the same micro-climate, dampness or whatever the heck helps them swing). The Aussies were trying to get one of these “swingers” on the field.
There’s even a movement here calling for the new captain to be appointed from outside the current playing squad ala Bob Simpson returning in 1977 ten years after his retirement, though he had been top of the aggregates in Sydney Club cricket during the hiatus.
The candidate they want to co=opt? Michael “Get ready for a broken f… arm” Clarke. ROFL The most divisive and selfish ego on legs we’ve appointed to the role since Bradman.
Better options abound. Langer, Hodge, Bailey or Voges off the top.
While what they did was disgraceful, and monumentally stupid the way they went about it, and Smith, Warner & Bancroft should rightly be punished, I think calls for ending careers is ridicously over the top. I agree with Cumbrian, every team does it to some extent at various times. As illustrated by charges over the years.
As to Smith never being able to walk on the field again? So Faf du Plessis never played again? Mike Atherton? Broad & Anderson?
I suspect people are worked up so much because Australia just lost the moral high ground about the ‘Spirit of Cricket’. I can’t help thinking there’s a little bit of the typical Australians unhealthy obsession/measuring of self worth via sports performances. Olympians don’t outperform? Inquiry into the national disgrace, Cricketers losing test match’s, catastrophe! Cheating? OMG heads must roll.
Well that at least makes sense…for a given value of “sense” that is. Maybe better to say that their logic was sound.
What he leaves out is that the bottle cap was used in practice and in county, rarely in Tests. To get reliable reverse swing the whole team, not just the bowlers and the skipper, as is traditional, have to be involved in ball preparation. Which is why Sarfraz and Imran used ball caps and corks in County, they were not permitted to share with everybody else when not on International duty. Hell, Wasim almost says that sometimes they purposefully picked the seam (which does fuck all for reverse) to ensure that the opponents would not catch on. They did skirt and occasionally go over the line though.
Its not the 1980’s and 1990’s that reverse swing is a national secret, everyone now knows how it works, and that team prep is better than using a foreign object. What the hell were the Aussies thinking?
Completely agree. This is certainly not an isolated incident in world cricket, but there is some satisfaction in seeing the Australian team getting caught.
I grew in Australia, as a rabid cricket fan. I cheered them throughout my youth, even though I often didn’t have much in the way of results to show for it.
I started watching cricket in earnest when i was 7 or 8 years old, in about 1976-77. That was the start of a decade-long run in which the Australia team won the Ashes only once out of six test series against England, and were routinely pummeled by the West Indies for the Frank Worrell trophy. In that ten-year stretch they also had a losing test record against India (5-4, with 10 draws and a tie), and only just managed to shade the Kiwis. Luckily for the Aussies, they didn’t have to play South Africa, who were shunned from world sports over apartheid.
So when the Australian team crushed England in the 1989 and 1990-91 Ashes series, setting up an unbeaten Ashes run over 13 years, and then began to beat the West Indies in the mid-1990s, i was ecstatic. I was living in England during the 1993 test series, and was at Headingly to see Allan Border and Steve Waugh put on over 300 runs in an unbeaten partnership, before the Aussie bowlers blazed through the England lineup twice to win the match by an innings and 100+ runs. And back in Australia, i attended at least a couple of days of the Sydney Ashes test in both the 1994-95 and 1998-99 series. All the frustrations of my youth were washed away by a 90s-era wave of victory.***
But by about 2000, i was also getting pretty annoyed with some members of the Australian team. I loved that they were winning, but some of these guys increasingly looked like assholes doing it. Also, while i like to win, it’s good when it’s close, and some of Australia’s victories during their golden run were walkovers. That’s nice for a while, but after a few times you want to see a real contest. I didn’t follow cricket too much after i moved to the US, but i’ve got plenty of Aussie friends (and my mother!) who are big cricket fans, but who have also become somewhat disillusioned with the lack of sportsmanship increasingly found in the Aussie team.
My best mate from high school is a cricket nut. He can name every Australian Ashes touring side going back to the Bodyline series. He’s been critical of some of the players and the general team hubris for a while, and he’s really pissed off about this incident.
*** I was also living in England when the Wallabies won the 1991 World Cup Rugby against England at Twickenham, after convincingly beating the All-Blacks in the semi. And I was at Old Trafford in November 1990, when Mal Meninga and Ricky Stuart combined for a last-minute length-of-the-field try that saved the Kangaroos from being the first touring rugby league team in a decade to lose a series again Great Britain.
The early '90s was a great time for an Aussie sports fan to be living in the UK.
Have you considered a career as David Warner’s speechwriter?
He’s looking for an apologist.
Moises Henrique’s take on this is that Bancroft acted alone and Smith et al panicked before the press conference and decided to protect him by spreading the blame with himself and the leadership group. I’m not convinced this theory survives Occam’s razor but I want to think it’s possible.
I find it especially galling that Simon Katich has been publicly pontificating and wants Smith, Warner and Lehman sacked - as if ball tampering is so much worse than physically assaulting a team mate. He’s never understood when to shut up.
It’s looking likely that Justin Langer will replace Lehmann as coach. I’m not confident team culture will improve as a result: