When SA plays the Aussies, heaven knows it’s not just cricket, it’s blinking tabloid poker

Faf du Plessis should walk into his first media conference in Australia wearing a towel around his waist, sucking a mint while accompanied by the tune of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable

Now by The [Steve] Smiths. He should joke about sandpaper, shoulders, stair, barging and sledging. He should take it to the local media pack because some of them will dearly want to take it to him. Such has been the way of things for South Africans in Australia.

The mental disintegration begins early doors and carries on through reports and the crowd. Faf said it best just before the team left for their tour of Australia on Tuesday: it will be “nice and hostile It’ sa poker game also ... we expect them to try and unsettle us as team in the media. Having been at the forefront for quite a bit of it, we see it as part and parcel of playing in Australia. This time around there might be one or two more traps for the players to try and stay away from.”

Coaches and players do like it when the local media get stuck into visiting teams. When the Wallabies toured here in 2005, I got a call from a SA journalist who had been asked by Jake White, then the Bok coach, to ask me to write filth about the Australians. They did it to the Springboks, therefore, he reckoned, we should do it to them. It seemed fair enough. Not really my thing, though. But a few days later, the Wallabies did themselves in during a dinner in Cape Town.

The Wallabies backs coach, Scott Wisemantel, put together a team-building exercise that went along the lines of Alive, the movie about the Uruguayan rugby team forced to eat their mates to stay alive after their plane crashed in the Andes.

Lote Tuqiri, part of that team, recalled: “If you had to eat someone in your team, who would you eat first? We had a couple of nice, plump front rowers then not so plump these days ... 90% of the blokes went with Matt Dunning.”

The Wallabies made the mistake of leaving the sheets of paper on the table. A waiter picked them up and they got passed on to the Cape Times. Jonathan Ancer wrote the story. “I couldn’t help myself and got carried away. I think I wrote at the time that they liked their steaks ‘well Dunning’. It was that sort of silliness.”

Perhaps, though, Du Plessis and the Proteas will not get it so hard. Cricket Australia (CA) are still not in the greatest place after the sandpaper story. There have been questions over the timing of the release of the reviews into the culture of Australia cricket, which was instigated because of what went on in SA. The Daily Telegraph, the Sydney tabloid, yesterday ran stories headlined: “Australia vows to do better after horror year” and “How Australia is rebuilding after Sandpapergate”.

James Sutherland, the CA CEO who left the organisation this week, said he had been heartbroken by the sandpaper incident. “I think that in some ways I totally understand that in the heat of battle things can boil over and go awry and there can be regrettable incidents. [But] I think in some ways the issues of Cape Town were a different thing altogether, it wasn’t necessarily a confrontation between two players, that was a premeditated WTF moment that shocked us all.

“Part of my disappointment around Cape Town is heightened by what happened earlier in the series, and my feeling that there were warning signals. my views were expressed during and after the Durban Test that we needed to take stock and be very aware that when you’re playing SA, you’re playing in a cauldron and we’ve got two teams that go very hard at each other. Our leadership needs to show restraint and understand it’s not the first time that things have boiled over on the field between CA and SA and it won’t be the last time.”

Will things be different this time around? Will the Australians show restraint, on and off the park? Probably not.

But, man, you just know you won’t be able to take your eyes off this series. Seconds out, round number two…