Black Caps win while Australia embarrass themselves
Any week where the most celebrated image in the world is of an Australian cricketer with his hands down his pants has quite a bit going for it.
Many of us have long harboured suspicions about the Australian character, but here was proof writ large. Australian selflove had spilt over into public selfpleasuring. The Northern Territory News, a tabloid jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s publishing crown, said it best, its covering headline seeking to explain why Cameron Bancroft ‘‘had some sticky near... [his] dicky’’.
Developments since have revealed the tampering agent to be sandpaper, not sellotape. Either way, the scandal shamed a nation while sending the balance of the planet into varying degrees of hysterics. It was but one half of a near perfect five or so days, complementing New Zealand’s 10th test victory over the mother country.
England’s last-wicket partnership proved better than the collective efforts of the rest. The magic total of 26 was avoided. The New Zealand side of 1955 remain bottom of the heap, the worst single-innings performers of all time. But at least they were never caught cheating.
It’s such a temptation to gloat and revel in the fall from grace of Steve Smith and David Warner, the presumed orchestrators of the plan. If Bancroft was the equivalent of the incompetent Watergate Hotel break-in crew, and Darren Lehmann Richard Nixon, setting the ethical tone for the transgression, if not necessarily overseeing its finer detail, Smith and Warner were G Gordon Liddy, masters of dirty tricks delegation, asking subordinates to perform tasks they were not prepared to do themselves.
Where this analogy breaks down is in Bancroft’s and then Smith’s confession. Did they know nothing of history? Nixon consistently maintained he was not a crook.
Confession might be good for the soul, but it plays havoc with the reputation. Better to lie loudly and often. Create a sense of plausible deniability. It’s worked for all the thousands of other ball tamperers throughout the game’s history.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? As much as we want to assume the high moral ground, we know the crime is commonplace, the equivalent of doing 80kmh in a 50kmh zone. Martin Crowe and his ‘‘leadership group’’ of 1990 hatched a similar ball-tampering plan against Pakistan, believing they were merely levelling the playing field against a cheating opposition. It proved to be a case of not beating them, just joining them. Chris Pringle took seven for 52, yet Waqar Younis’ overall return of 12 for 130 was match-winning.
Pakistan are in a class of their own. They remain the only team to be collectively charged with the offence, refusing to retake the field in 2006 after umpire Darrell Hair had replaced a ball he believed they had disfigured, and administered a penalty. There is also the bizarre case of Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi, who, in 2010, attempted to readjust the seam with his teeth, as much a case of ball eating as ball tampering.
Ironically enough, Australia’s opposition in this match have themselves been transgressors in the recent past. Faf du Plessis used a lolly on the ball in 2016, and his zipper in 2013. Vernon Philander applied his thumb and fingernail in 2014.
With the exception of Crowe and Pringle, whose admissions came post retirement, none of these players ever confessed to the charge, even if, as in the Bancroft case, video evidence left precious little room for doubt. Afridi said that he was moved by the smell of worn leather and merely attempting to take in the ball’s pungent aroma. Stuart Broad, accused alongside fellow English seamer James Anderson of tampering after rubbing the ball along the ground with his boot spikes in 2010, claimed that he was ‘‘just being lazy’’.
There was no such laziness on display from Broad or Anderson when New Zealand tested their mettle at Eden Park. The game was not short of passion or on-field aggression, but respect for the opposition went hand in hand with respect for cricket itself. What a week of contrasts.