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Australia might be sitting atop the world test rankings (and the T20 rankings – who really cares about that?), but they will never live down Sandpapergate.
It’s been more than two years since cameras caught Cameron Bancroft shoving sandpaper down the front of his pants, which would lead to snot en trane from the likes of David Warner and Steve Smith.
The team has since embarked on a serious PR blitz, culminating in The Test, a docuseries that follows them in the aftermath of Sandpapergate, and fair play to them for trying to root out what was a terrible team culture.
So terrible, in fact, that in the test match after they were caught out in one of the country’s greatest sporting scandals, their team management tried to pin the Proteas for ball-tampering.
Below via Wisden, covering umpire Ian Gould’s autobiography, Gunner: My Life In Cricket:
Gould [who was the TV umpire in the Newlands test] also revealed how Australia were almost led to believe that South Africa had been tampering in the next Test in Johannesburg, thanks to a small incident that happened at the end of day one.
“At the end of day one I was walking off, put my hand in my pocket and one of the [lolly] wrappers fell out,” Gould wrote. “I pushed it down a stump hole with my boot on one of the pitches on the edge of the square and thought nothing more of it.
“The following morning, the Australian bowlers were doing their warm-ups on the same wicket. You can probably guess what happened next. A few minutes later, their bowling coach David Saker knocked on our door and came in. ‘We’ve got ’em!’ he said. By that, we took it to mean that my sweet wrapper he had in his hand was the evidence that the South Africans had been applying saliva from Werther’s Originals to get the ball to swing on what was another flat deck.
“I looked at Andy [Pycroft, the match referee] and he looked at me, and both of us tried to keep a straight face. I reached into my pocket and rolled a couple of Werther’s along the table towards Saker. ‘These sweets, you mean?’ How Andy stopped himself dissolving into fits of laughter, I’ll never know. It was a ridiculous accusation to make on the flimsiest of evidence, but that’s how bad things had got between the teams. They were paranoid.”
They flipped their lid over a lolly paper.
Faf du Plessis did make a habit of shining the ball with additional saliva gleaned from sucking on a mint (he admitted the charge and was found guilty of ball-tampering back in 2016), but that doesn’t really compare to using sandpaper that you rammed down your rods.
Yet, just a week later, members of Australia’s coaching staff had the gall to run to the umpires brandishing a Werther’s Original wrapper – shameless.
A reminder that the test in question, the fourth and final of the series, resulted in a 492-run win for the Proteas.
Gould’s memoir also revealed how umpires suspected the Australian team of ball-tampering before the Newlands test match, and had asked SuperSport to keep an eye on them:
“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 message on my phone, warning me that things were starting to get a little bit out of hand,” Gould wrote…
“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.”
SuperSport found plenty, and the rest is history.
I know it’s been more than two years since Sandpapergate, but the Ozzies spent in excess of a decade dismantling our test side in series after series.
For that fact alone, we should laugh at them for the lolly paper incident.
[source:wisden]
