Chennai: Mike Atherton was fined a big amount in 1994 when he used sand in his trouser pockets to rough up the ball. Among other culprits docked were also Sachin Tendulkar — cleaning the seam — and Rahul Dravid for applying lozenge-loaded saliva, although at the time Sachin was rapped for just cleaning the seam we thought the suspended sentence of one-match ban was akin to the Pope being accused of bigamy.
What makes the great difference in this latest episode of altering the condition of the ball is the Australians have over a decade and a half come to hate their cricket team. They love it for winning as they are part of the ‘Advance Australia Fair’ kind of jingoism but they hate them for their uppity behaviour and their constant badgering of opponents which their Sun Tzu-loving former captain Steve Waugh likened to bringing about 'mental disintegration' of the opposition.
The arrogance of Australian sportsmen has been a sporting trademark in history.
This Smith character and his deputy Warner, however, seem to be straight out of 3 idiots. His bumbling act of altering the ball in the era of high definition cameras is extremely naïve and he has to pay the penalty. Especially so because this has come in the most confrontational of all series, with verbally sparring players stopped from coming to blows near the dressing rooms only by a clutch of cricketers of both teams.
The naivety of the captain was clear in his saying that he wasn’t thinking of stepping down at the first media conference at the Newlands Test in Cape Town.
It is obvious that CA has been pressured to ask the ‘leaders’ to step down, which is what Smith has done now from Rajasthan Royals captaincy as well and which Warner is expected to reprise with Hyderabad Sunrisers. The Australian inquiry will revolve around whether Darren Lehmann was also aware of the malpractice and what to do about Bancroft who was used by the captain and deputy.
There is no national cricket team that has not dabbled in ball tampering, including India whose pace bowlers Kapil Dev and Manoj Prabhakar picked up the tricks of the trade from Pakistani fast bowlers during the 1989 tour. Kapil Dev refused to demonstrate the art to me as I might spill the beans while writing reports. He also stopped Manoj from showing me what they were doing with the ball to make it ‘reverse’. But the art is well known enough and is about creating the imbalance in the two halves of the leather sphere.
The Australians who were the first to use sledging as an art form to distract opposing batsmen were crying foul in South Africa when the verbal war started getting personal and also involved David Warner's triathlete wife. There was so much bad blood in the ongoing series that an Aussie comeback with such a conspiracy was almost predictable. But they must pay the price is the universal cry, including from their sporting Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
A six-month ban is the minimum sentence the cricket world expects, not as much for ball tampering as for collective chicanery that undoes the hard but fair way of sport the Aussies so love to preach the sporting world.The ‘Ugly Aussie’ cheats must be put in their place now.
