Ball-tampering sanctions gloss over wider malaise
Cricket Australia (CA) moved at astonishing speed to deal with the ball-tampering affair at Newlands, and they did a clinically efficient job.
The head of CA’s integrity unit was packing his bags for Sydney Airport moments after Steve Smith said “we’re not proud of this but we’ll move on from it”.
Rarely has there been starker evidence of the disconnect between professional sportsmen and the real world.
Iain Roy landed in SA and began work immediately. Despite the complexities involved, he managed to sprint through his work in 48 hours and conclude there were only three people involved and that it was a one-off instance.
If this was cricket’s version of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he could not have done a better job of encasing it in lead and burying it in concrete.
How did Australia get the ball to reverse swing after just 28 overs on the lush, green square and outfield at St George’s Park? Was the strapping and bandaging on David Warner’s hand checked for abrasive but almost invisible substances, such as dried superglue?
Were any of the South African players asked for evidence — especially the one who is convinced he saw Warner repeatedly take something from his pocket moments before shining the ball and then replace it? Of course not. Three batsmen hatched a plot to tamper with the ball and did not tell any of the bowlers. None of the bowlers were aware of the ball’s natural condition being changed prematurely. They simply got on with their job, oblivious to what was making the ball swing so lavishly. It all comes down to plausible deniability.
Like the man who regularly sees his brother’s car outside a neighbour’s house when he has told his wife he is going to the squash club — he makes sure he knows nothing more than that so he can always deny knowledge of the affair.
And most other people keep quiet too. What good can come of exposing it, they reason. And in the case of sport, that may very well be the case.
We want to escape from the grind or stress of daily life and we need to believe it is a clean contest. CA and other administrative bodies need to create the impression that their product is exactly that, even if it isn’t. A protracted exposure of systematic cheating will send sponsors, and their millions of dollars, running for cover.
CA lost more than A$20m after the Ashes title sponsor, Magellan, ripped up its three-year contract after just 12 months.
Cricket SA and the International Cricket Council did a similar thing with the King Commission almost two decades ago: Hansie Cronjé operated alone in his dealings with illegal bookmakers and gamblers; no one else was involved or even knew anything, apart from Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams, who were largely innocent drug mules, cruelly tricked into carrying out the dead. And then, in fact, failing to do so.
It may just be conceivable that all of Cronjé’s team-mates were innocent — but not of using plausible deniability as a defence. It is inconceivable that there were no other international players with whom Cronjé was involved.
But the King Commission did its job. Judge Edwin King controlled proceedings with verve and, at times, care, and the government was seen to be taking a proactive role in making certain South African cricket was clean.
Cronjé was encased in lead and buried in concrete.
The ball-tampering thing will quickly fade. Every team tries to get the ball to reverse swing — cricketers know that. Sandpaper was just an excess so extreme it is hilarious.
What won’t be possible to encase in lead and bury in concrete is the culture of Australian cricket that has been making many followers and lovers of the game feel nauseous for more than 25 years. Now that the Australian public has expressed the same view, there is no way out.
Smith said the balltampering was a one-off. He said the same about his surreptitious look to the change room for assistance with an umpire decision review during the Test series against India in 2017. “A brain fade,” he said.
Smith was a weak captain easily manipulated by a bully of a coach in Darren Lehmann, who encouraged — sometimes insisted — his players to be verbally antagonistic and nasty.
There is an acceptance that things have to change and, unlike match-fixing and balltampering, this is something that will not go away.