Cricket Australia has acted quickly to resurrect the fair name of the game, by banning the three musketeers — Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft from international and domestic cricket. The BCCI followed up quickly to ban Smith and Warner from IPL-11. And while it seems that ‘all is well’ with the cricket world once again, the Australian coach Darren Lehmann has managed to stage the ‘Great Escape’.
Cricketers are aghast at the coach being exonerated while three batsmen, who reportedly hatched the plan to tamper with the ball during a break in the Newlands Test, have been hung out to dry. Kevin Pietersen’s reaction — of smileys laughing until they cry — says it all. The derision is well-illustrated here because the so-called leadership group seems confined to the captain, vice-captain and one older batsman who acted as the lackey.
The sequence of events shows that Lehmann became aware when he watched the action through binoculars as the umpires first started questioning the fielder. He then picked up the walkie-talkie to pass instructions to the sub near the field to talk to Bancroft. At which point Bancroft became so nervous that he stuffed the yellow tape into his trousers for the camera to catch it.
The internal inquiry, however, seems to have concluded that Lehmann was unaware, if not innocent, in this instance of ball tampering. But many questions arise because as coach, Lehmann was responsible for the prevailing culture in the Australian cricket team.
The IPL team, which used to play under Lehmann, thought of him as a control freak obsessed with playing for success. Nothing moved in the team’s dressing room without his knowledge. Lehmann helped Team Australia rebuild in the old tradition of the ‘Ugly Aussie’ who played the sport with an “in your face” brand of confrontational cricket.
No wonder then that the cricket world finds it hard to believe that Lehmann was not part of the ‘leadership group’ of Australian cricket. What is Cricket Australia trying to prove in stubbornly hanging on to its coach at a time of the great cheating scandal? A number of ex-Australian players are also convinced that in letting Lehmann go scot-free, Australia is losing an opportunity to start with a clean slate and take out the remnants of the Lehmann system of aggravated style of playing cricket.
