England raise eyebrows as cricket cheating furore rocks Australia
Scoundrels have always existed in sport – but the brazenness of the cricket team has astounded all
STUART BROAD, the England bowler, hinted at suspicion of Australian balltampering during the Ashes as the cricket scandal deepened yesterday.
Broad, speaking in New Zealand where England are on tour, voiced his surprise that Australia were claiming the ball-tampering in the third Test against South Africa was a one-off, because of the reverse swing the Australian bowlers managed to generate against England’s batsmen.
“Look at the Ashes series that we’ve just played,” he said. “You look through virtually all of those Test matches and they reverse swung the ball, sometimes in conditions that you wouldn’t expect the ball to reverse, so I don’t understand why they’ve changed their method for this one game.”
Steve Smith, the Australian captain, is facing the sack after he was banned for one Test for his part in the ball-tampering. The scandal transfixed Australia over the weekend, with even Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, intervening. He called it a “shocking disappointment” and urged Cricket Australia to take “decisive action”. Jim Maxwell, the commentator, struggled to contain his emotions on air. Smith and his vice-captain, David Warner, were stood down from their jobs for the final day of the third Test in South Africa yesterday, which Australia lost.
It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at the gold-plated imbroglio those delightful Australian cricketers have got themselves into. A team that chooses to define itself by how confrontational it can be finds itself hoist by its own petard after cheating during the Test match in Cape Town.
The public face of Australian cricket is the captain, Steve Smith, a batsman of exceptional ability, but a rather less impressive ambassador for the game. Mind you, he is a paragon of virtue compared with his vice-captain, one David Warner, who has spent the better part of his career trying to live up to St Augustine’s prayer: “Lord, make me virtuous – but not yet.”
Smith and Warner presided over the “leadership group” which thought it a good idea to scuff up the ball in full view of the television cameras, in order to affect the course of the match. They then entrusted Cameron Bancroft, the cheeky new bug of the team, to do the scuffing, with a poorly concealed piece of tape.
When did a cricket team, where the captain has traditionally been a king without a crown, rely on a “leadership group”? That smacks of a sixth-form trip to the Brecon Beacons without map or compass. Perhaps, as the great cricket writer, John Woodcock, once said of errant England players who had behaved poorly, “they should be made to wear short trousers”.
There is nothing new under the sun, and certainly not when it comes to cheating in sport. “It’s not cricket,” we say, or used to say, whenever people subvert our notion of fair play. But it never was. Sportsmen are only so much flesh and blood, and cricketers, though they play the game of the gods, are as frail as anybody.
WG Grace, the bearded Victorian who more or less created the game we call cricket, was a notorious scoundrel. “They’ve come to watch me bat,” he told a bowler who had the effrontery to knock over his castle. Yet when spectators enter Lord’s, the holiest of holies, they walk through the Grace Gates. In the pavilion, they may look at his portrait.
A great cricketer of more recent vintage, Colin Cowdrey, used the reputation he had carefully established for fair play to serve him when it suited his purpose. It didn’t stop him becoming Baron Cowdrey of Tonbridge, and the first president of the International Cricket Council. He wasn’t a cheat, but within cricket he was not universally admired. When Chris Cowdrey, his son, was batting for Kent at Leicester, he received an introductory bouncer from Ken Higgs, the former England seamer, who told him: “That’s for you.” The next ball also went past the young man’s nose. “And that,” said the glowering Higgs, “is for your dad.” Bowlers have long memories.
What is cheating? Footballers dive and feign injury every weekend, and pundits defend them for being “professional”. Rugby players seek to profit at set pieces. Tennis players grunt and dawdle. Motor racers charge rivals into the nearest ditch. And then there are the cyclists, who are apparently full of drugs. Perhaps only golf is absolutely clean.
The amount of money sloshing around in top-level sport, reinforced by the public profile sportsmen and women command, can turn minds. Winning becomes the only thing, and the sportsman who chooses not to seek an advantage can be isolated within the dressing-room, with its tightly woven loyalties.
But when people cheat as brazenly as the Australians at Cape Town, there can be no equivocation. Nor has there been. Australians, who want the people who represent them at games to be hard but fair, are appalled at what Smith ordered his men to do. You wouldn’t want to be in his boots right now. This is not something that can be blithely wished away.
When Michael Atherton, then captain of England, was in hot water at Lord’s in 1994, having kept dust in his pocket, he escaped to the Lake District for a week. The landlord of a Cartmel pub told a reporter who was sniffing around: “We don’t want the gutter press in here.” Smith may find (indeed, has found already) that Australians will be less tolerant of his recklessness.
“It’s not cricket.” True. Not now; not ever. But in our heart of hearts, we want our sportsmen to play the ball with a straight bat. Otherwise, no matter how great the rewards, the game is not worth playing.