Ball-tampering is to cricket what sex between unmarried people is to normal life: widely practised and frowned on only by the hopelessly left behind.
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in London
THERE they were in the slip cordon, gathered like spent beer bottles on a sticky bar counter, in descending order of notoriety: David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft. Advancing Australia fair. Or, perhaps, unfair.
Maybe Aleem Dar and Joel Wilson should have stuffed rubber gloves into their pockets for strip-searching purposes.
For the first time since that dark day at Newlands last March, the ball-tampering gang — the members we know about, at least — are on the field together.
They are at Edgbaston, where the boorish booing of Smith after he had scored a century all who saw it were privileged to have witnessed it was the passive-aggressive approval of England’s most Australian crowd. Happily, by the time Smith made another hundred in the second innings they had learnt their lesson.
How does it make you feel, cricketminded South Africans, that the cheats are back?
If you’re angry, here’s hoping you were also indignant each of the three times South Africans have been done for the same offence in not quite six years.
And that you were fuming that not once were they dealt with nearly as severely as Australia’s suits punished their miscreants. Instead, they were bombastically defended, and worse: at least once broadcasters were threatened with the withdrawal of the rights they had paid for if they dared reveal the evidence on air.
Are you happy to see the Aussies back where you reckon they belong? Even Warner? The most unpleasant player to cross the boundary in the modern game, perhaps ever? It must be bad enough having to put up with him as an opponent, but spare a thought for those who have to endure him at the even closer quarters of the dressingroom and the team bus. To be trapped in a team meeting with him must be a special kind of hell.
Are you satisfied that the ball-tamperers have done their time and been rehabilitated, and deserve to be treated like everyone else? Good luck with that. The sandpaper jokes, none of them good, so far, will follow them into the commentary box and the coach’s tracksuit, or wherever they go in the game after their playing careers, and for all of the rest of the days of their lives.
Are you indifferent? So you don’t mind a spot of cunning crookery? Truth be told, in this instance neither does your columnist: batters have been gifted too many unfair advantages in cricket, and in all formats. It’s high time bowlers, aided and abetted by their henchmen, evened the score, whether that’s within the rules — they are not laws — or without.
Besides, ball-tampering is to cricket what sex between unmarried people is to normal life: widely practised and frowned on only by the hopelessly left behind.
And let’s not forget that Warner, Smith and Bancroft did what they did in the cause of trying to win. How does it make sense that they are regarded as worse than matchfixers?
That covers all the bases. Take your pick and live with it. But also ask yourself another question: would your reaction to the exposure of the cheating been so visceral had it not happened in an already feral series? And another: would you have been quite so keen to condemn the three Australians had they not been Australian?
By then, Warner’s thuggishness had been exposed on the dressingroom stairs at Kingsmead and Candice Warner had been abusively victimised by the neanderthals of St George’s Park, where Dale Mpofu’s expensive intervention was required to get Kagiso Rabada and his hotheadedness off a hook the fast bowler had baited and cast and bitten into himself.
Only after all that did this saga go nuclear at Newlands. And only if South Africa’s opponents had been England or India would the fallout have been of similar proportions.
Similar but not the same. No-one pushes buttons like the Australians, and not by accident. It’s an important part of their game to rile their opponents into irrationality.
So they don’t earn empathy. But even Warner deserves to come down off the cross some time or another. That time is now.
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