Kiwi umpire ‘had suspicions’
A New Zealander was one of the umpires who first suspected the Australian cricket team of their ball-tampering tactics in South Africa in 2018, a fellow official has claimed.
Chris Gaffaney was part of the umpiring crew for the first two of Australia’s tests against the hosts, and England’s Ian Gould said Gaffaney alerted him that the issue was about to explode before the third test.
Gould was the TV umpire for the third test at Newlands, in which television broadcasters helped show the visiting side tampering with the ball with sandpaper while bowling.
The International Cricket Council initially banned Australian captain Steve Smith for one test and fined opener Cameron Bancroft after the pair confessed to be involved in a plan to change the condition of the ball.
Cricket Australia launched its own investigation following outrage at home and abroad. Star opener David Warner was found to be the instigator of the plan and banned from international cricket for a year, as was Smith, who was also stripped of the captaincy.
In his recently released autobiography, Gould wrote that the match officials – not the television commentators as previously believed – were responsible for instigating the host broadcasters to implement a sting operation on Australia’s ball-tampering.
‘‘A few days before I headed to Cape Town, Chris Gaffaney, the very capable New Zealander who was third umpire for the first test in Durban, and had stood with Kumar Dharmasena in Port Elizabeth in the second match, left a
It was during another one-sided Australian Ashes victory on English soil that touring captain Steve Waugh expressed his biggest frustrations about test rain delays: ‘‘those bloody Headingley ’81 re-runs on TV’’.
Between 1989 and 2003 England won just eight tests in as many series and were frequently humiliated on home soil by Waugh, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and co.
But whenever the heavens opened during a day’s play, the vacant TV air time seemed to be perennially filled with replays of Ian Botham and Bob Willis inspiring England to a remarkable 18-run win after following-on.
Well, the good news for Australian fans and players who’ll tour England again in 2022 is those Leeds heroics have been put to the back of the cupboard.
The bad news is they’ve been replaced by the new miracle of Headingley from last August when Christchurch-born Ben Stokes broke Australian hearts with one of the greatest test innings of all time.
With the UK in coronavirus lockdown, TV and radio stations have been digging into the archives for content in a bid to give sports-starved fans some kind of daily fix. message on my phone, warning me that things were starting to get a little bit out of hand.
‘‘The umpiring team had their suspicions that Australia were working a little too aggressively on the condition of the ball, and they had an informal word with the host broadcaster SuperSport asking that if their camera crew saw anything that looked unusual they should let the umpires know,’’ Gould wrote in his autobiography, Gunner: My Life In Cricket.
Australia’s players claimed that no ball-tampering took place before the third test.
Gould also wrote that Gaffaney and the umpiring team for the first two tests in the series were too inexperienced and that was a mistake.
‘‘In hindsight, ICC’s decision not to bring Illy [Richard Illingworth], Nige [Nigel Llong] and myself in until the third test was a mistake,’’ Gould wrote.
‘‘Two of the three lads who did the first two tests were relatively inexperienced.
‘‘Dharmasena had stood in over
50 tests but Chris was in only his
19th game and the other umpire, Sundaram Ravi from India, had fewer than 25 tests under his belt and within a year or so had been kicked off the elite panel because he wasn’t deemed good enough.
‘‘Like I said, hindsight is a wonderful thing but I’m absolutely sure the English trio including me would have got on top of things from the off.’’