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The plot, described by The Australian as “Our Baggy Green Shame,” thickens.
The ball-tampering incident during the Cape Town Test against South Africa was not a one-off incident. The Australian cheating has been going on, sometimes in a different form, for some time. That is only one aspect of the affair that is significant.
The cheating incident did not only involve Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft among the Australian players.
And which officials, those on the Australian Test squad coaching staff, at Cricket Australia and at ICC, turned a blind eye to the cheating culture of the Australian Test team over the past couple of years?
So, what did Steve Smith know and when?
What did David Warner and any other player know and when?
What did Darren Lehmann and his staff know and when?
What did James Sutherland, the chief executive of Cricket Australia, and Pat Howard, the high performance manager, know and when?
What did the ICC, through its match referees and through information provided to it by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, know and when?
A good starting point in getting to the truth of these questions would be for the authorities to revisit the Test series played between India and Australia in India in 2017.
On 9 March 2017 The Roar published an article I wrote, “Steve Smith’s ‘brain fade’ was cheating that should be punished,” that went into great detail describing how the Australians tried to cheat the DSR system.
Steve Smith was caught looking to the Australian dressing room for guidance while considering to review a LBW decision against him.
(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
The former Indian captains, Sunil Gavaskar and Sourav Ganguly, insisted that the ICC investigate the incident.
The Australian’s cricket writer, Peter Lalor, reported that the ICC’s match referee Chris Broad told reporters that he had seen the incident and implied he was not taking further action regarding it. He also indicated, according to Lalor, that he was not aware of the Australians having ‘systematically’ cheating.
Just stop here.
If Broad, the ICC or Cricket Australia had properly investigated the complaint made by Gavaskar and Ganguly, the tendency to cheat that now marks Steve Smith’s era as captain of Australia might have stopped in its tracks.
This is not being wise after the event.
The facts of the matter speak for themselves. This is why I gave my article the heading that ran with it.
Smith admitted that he did look to the Australian dressing room for guidance. He explained his action with the damning words that he had had “a brain fade.” Guilty as charged, in other words.
His batting partner at the time, Peter Handscomb, also admitted to the cheating with this tweet: “I referred smudga to look at the box … my fault and was unaware of the rule.” Again, guilty as charged.
Why didn’t the ICC’s match referee Chris Broad take Smith at his word and investigate the “brain fade” cheating?
Details raised at the time suggests that this incident was not a one-off.
Ganguly made the accusation to The Star Sports feed in Bangalore that he “personally witnessed Australia sending men to the stands and instructing them to give DRS signals.”
The implication here is that the “brain fade” incident was not a one off.
This accusation of several offences and its publication was reported by Ben Horne in The Daily Telegraph.
This is important because it means that Cricket Australia would surely be informed about the accusation. Why wasn’t it investigated by Sutherland and Howard, given the details provided by Ganguly?
India’s captain, Virat Kohli, admittedly a fiery character in his own right, told a media conference convened to discuss the incident that he had seen on three occasions, twice when he was batting, Australians attempting to seek input over the reviews from the dressing room.
Kohli went on to make the further point, reported by the BBC (Steve Smith unfair play criticism “outrageous” – Australia CEO Sutherland), that he alerted the umpires about what he had seen: “I pointed that (Australians looking to the dressing room) out to the umpires as well that I had seen their players looking upstairs for conformation. We observed that, we told the match referee and the umpire that it’s been happening for the last three days and it has to stop.”
(Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images)
The significance of this accusation by Kohli, which endorsed Ganguly’s accusation, is that it charges not only the Australian players (when Australia was batting) but the coaching staff (when India was batting) with cheating the DSR system.
As well, it would have been a relatively easy matter for anyone in authority, the ICC or Cricket Australia, to ascertain what those three occasions were and then check them with the umpires and whatever video that could be made available to them.
The point I made in my article, too, was that we know for sure that Kohli was correct on at least one occasion. The probability, a very high probability in my opinion, is that he was correct about the other occasions.
Importantly, the umpires did not contest Kohli’s claims that he told them about the dubious behaviour of the Australians with DSR reviews.
Michael Clarke gave an interview to India Today in which he said this about the allegations: “I think Steve Smith respects the game and if it’s a one-off, then it is a brain fade. I want to find out more about it. But if Virat is correct and if Australia are using the DRS that way, then it is completely unacceptable and it is not a brain fade.”
Given this statement from a former distinguished captain, why didn’t the authorities investigate the accusations and the “brain fade” cheating incident more deeply?
The answer is because the authorities did not want to find out the truth. The authorities, especially Cricket Australia, preferred to shoot down the messenger rather than his message.
The proof of this assertion lies in the statement made by James Sutherland in response to the Indian outrage and accusations: “I find the allegations questioning the integrity of Steve Smith, the Australian team and the dressing room, outrageous.
“We reject any commentary that suggests our integrity was brought into disrepute or that systemic unfair tactics are used, and stand by Steve and the Australian cricketers who are proudly representing our country.”
With this statement Sutherland trashed three greats of Indian cricket. He virtually accused them of lying. His position is now untenable.
The allegations raised by the Indians, in fact, were not outrageous. They were justified by the facts. They should have been investigated and exposed as unacceptable cheating.
(STR/AFP/Getty Images)
It is now clear that James Sutherland should never have been so gung-ho defending “the integrity” of Steve Smith without actually looking into the allegations made against him.
In the media discussion of the Cape Town incident, evidence is flowing out like effluence from a sewer that suggests that “questioning the integrity of Steve Smith” is something that should have been done several years ago. “Systematic unfair tactics” were promoted by Steve Smith’s side.
It was not “outrageous” to make this claim.
Peter Lalor, in an eleoquently ferocious article in The Australian (“Price to pay for winning at all costs“), opens with this damning statement: “There is something rotten at the heart of the Australian cricket team. There’s no hiding from that now. Something has gone wrong in that shifting dressing room and it was going wrong well before Saturday.”
“Going wrong well before Saturday,” is the key and most troubling statement here. Those in the know actually have known about the cheating for some time.
Lalor notes that Steve Smith implicated Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood when he said “the leadership group” of Smith, Warner, Starc and Halzewood were involved in setting up the cheating: “Starc and Hazlewood had nothing to do with this and have been slandered.”
Lalor then points out that the South Africans were suspicious of David Warner’s bandaged hand during the second Test and wondered if ball-tampering was involved. They were even more suspicious, therefore, when Warner was moved to the slips at Cape Town and Cameron Bancroft was given the task of ball-maintenance: “The South African players swear they saw the Australians up to no good at Port Elizabeth.”
Simon Katich points out, too, that Mitchell Starc’s nine wickets with the reverse swinging ball in Durban will now be considered “suspicious.”
And there is more, the tampering was probably going on during the Ashes series.
“Bancroft was seen sliding what looked like sugar into his pocket during a break in play at the Ashes,” Lalor writes. “There was some dismissive excuse for that at time: nobody really cared that much.”
Now all those excuses about the integrity of the Australians are no longer valid. This, in turn, focuses or should focus the spotlight – unfortunately – on the wonderful bowling efforts by the Australian pace bowlers during the Ashes series.
One further revelation from the excellent Peter Lalor is heart-breaking: “The Australians play ugly on the field because they think it is how they play their best. They are aware it turns people off, but they are prepared to pay that price … It hasn’t sat well with everybody in the group. Some of the younger players were upset by the ugly scenes and baiting early in the tour …”
I find it contemptible that younger players struggling to establish themselves in the Test side, someone like Cameron Bancroft, were inducted into a vile culture of cheating, a culture that has destroyed possibly for decades the glorious brand of Australian cricket with its tradition of Trumper, Bradman, McCabe, O’Reilly, Miller, Harvey, Benaud, Davidson and all the other golden boys of past summers …
(AP Photo/Halden Krog)
Is it any wonder that the grand man of cricket broadcasting, Jim Maxwell, a true successor to Alan McGillvray and Johnny Moyes, was in tears as he announced the details of the ball-tampering scandal on the ABC.
Let one of the great contemporary writers on cricket, Malcolm Knox, have the final word: “James Sutherland and Pat Howard, who have overseen the deterioration of the Australian team culture to this point, are no more entitled to keep their jobs than are Steve Smith or Darren Lehmann. They’re all implicated, and rather than finding someone to hang out to dry, they should take collective responsibility.”