Smith dad tells of scandal toll
THE cheating scandal unfolding around Steve Smith is too much for his cricket-loving father to watch.
“I’m deliberately not reading about it or watching it on TV, as I don’t want to know,” Peter Smith told News Corp in an exclusive interview.
“Steve knows we’re supporting him, he’s our son, we’re there for him no matter what.”
Mr Smith, a chemist and a key figure in his son’s rise to Australian captain, said he and his wife Gillian were travelling to South Africa to be by their son’s side.
“It’s a very difficult time for the family, for all of us, not just Steve,” he said.
“We’re speaking to him on the phone every day, he’s been calling us.”
Mr Smith coached the star batsman until he was about 16.
Steve Smith and his deputy, David Warner, have been stood down and could face one-year bans after Smith’s extraordinary admission about cheating.
Smith told a media conference on Saturday the Australian team’s “leadership group” discussed breaking the rules during the third Test, after Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera tampering with the ball.
Bancroft used sticky tape to gather grit from the ground which was rubbed into one side of the ball in a bid to get it to reverse swing.
The vision showed him trying to hide the tape down the front of his pants. Bancroft has been charged with ball tampering.
The Australian team went into lockdown in South Africa yesterday as outrage at the biggest scandal in world cricket in years reverberated around the world of sport.
Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland flew to South Africa to launch an official investigation, as pressure grew on coach Darren Lehmann.
Former Test opener Justin Langer heads the queue of likely replacements. With the team in disarray, axed Test opener Matt Renshaw was also recalled and was flying to South Africa for the Fourth Test, starting on Friday in Johannesburg.
As officials and players stayed silent on the scandal, theories abounded about who knew what, and when.
One former teammate, Moises Henriques, said yesterday he doubted there was a leadership group meeting at which the tampering was discussed, and Smith had come up with that line during “10 minutes of panic” before the after-match press conference.
“I dare say there was never a senior players meeting to discuss cheating — Smith made that up to take the heat off a young Cameron Bancroft not realising the outrage that would follow,” he tweeted.
Smith did not identify who was in the leadership group he mentioned, but it was believed to include Warner as well as Nathan Lyon, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood.
But it is understood other players, particularly Starc and Hazlewood, are furious they have been linked to the scandal by association and will seek help from the players’ union to clear their names.