How Warner and Smith were targeted
The instant Australia’s cricketers emerged from Edgbaston, Birmingham, to board the team bus, it started again.
‘‘Cheat, cheat, cheat,’’ a rowdy crowd of English fans chanted at David Warner, Steve Smith and company during the first test of the Ashes series last August.
Then came their favourite line, delivered from close range behind crowd barriers and a line of security guards: ‘‘We saw you cry on the telly, we saw you cry on the telly,’’ in reference to Warner and Smith’s tearful press conferences following the Cape Town ball tampering scandal.
The footage of the crowd, and Warner and Smith’s reactions from aboard the team bus, features in a new Amazon Prime documentary The Test: A New Era For Australia’s Team which premiered in Sydney last night.
It charts the Australian team behind the scenes from the wake of the ball tampering scandal which saw Warner and Smith banned for a year, and their returns in 2019 for the Cricket World Cup and the Ashes, which they retained with a 2-2 series draw in England.
The crowd noise reached its peak at Edgbaston, the first test of that series which Australia won by 251 runs, with Smith named man of the match.
‘‘Just the abuse . . . by the end they decided to laugh in the face of it, and that takes immense courage,’’ coach Justin Langer says in a preview clip from The Test.
The on-bus footage shows the Australians smiling and laughing as fans line the street to shout at them. Warner gives a royal wave and toots the bus horn while a laughing Smith says: ‘‘They’re such children’’.
The players erupt into hysterics as one fan advances towards the moving bus while rubbing his hands together in mock sandpapering, as Smith labels it ‘‘good comedy’’.
‘‘That was all part of trying to embrace it. We just went with it,’’ captain Tim Paine said. ‘‘People were everywhere on the street. That’s just how Edgbaston was, it was a really aggressive place.’’