Former SA pacer Fanie de Villiers tipped off cameraman
Now he has emerged as one of the key figures in exposing the current Australian side as ball tamperers.
Cape Town: Twenty-four years ago Fanie de Villiers dismantled an Australian cricket team with a sensational spell of swing bowling. Now he has emerged as one of the key figures in exposing the current Australian side as ball tamperers.
De Villiers told an Australian radio station that he had tipped off the camera crew that caught Cameron Bancroft rubbing the ball with a piece of yellow tape which the batsman then tried to conceal.
“We actually said to our cameramen: ‘Go out. Have a look, boys. They are using something.’ It’s impossible for the ball to get altered like that on a cricket wicket where we knew there is a grass covering on. It’s not a Pakistani wicket where there are cracks every centimetre. I said earlier that if they could get reverse swing in the 26th, 27th, 28th over, then they are doing something different.”
According to De Villiers, it took the cameramen an hour and a half of searching before they caught Bancroft in the act.