Ball tampering row: The 'gentleman's game' officially died a few days ago

What the Australian ball-tampering scandal means for one of the world's best-loved sports

There is something strangely soothing about what is currently transpiring in Australian cricket. For years now, the Australian team has consistently found ways to pull off abominable on-field feats that serve only to corroborate its image as a pack of devious tricksters, a bunch of players that places itself on a sanctimonious pedestal only for its misdeeds to bring it tumbling down. We are at a classic schadenfreude moment, when the prevailing sense of sadistic pleasure seems more or less reasonable.

But while the startling disintegration of a world-class squad and its two supremely talented commanders may delight rival teams and fans, the past week has pushed the sport itself into a quagmire it will struggle to emerge from. Ravi Shastri can try all he wants, but cricket is definitely the loser here. The sight of a tense, queasy Steven Smith, the Australian captain, flanked by the rookie Cameron Bancroft, who had the look of a man who had just seen a ghost, appear in front of the press made for genuinely absorbing theatre. Every question seemed like a damning indictment; a brief period of ceaseless probing that eventually helped unravel a planned — though not very clever— conspiracy.

The duo was quizzed on how Bancroft had managed to rough up one side of the ball by rubbing a bit of sandpaper against it, an act that was captured in high definition. On being alerted that he had been caught on camera, Bancroft nervously shoved the mysterious substance down his underpants. By then, of course, the damage had been done. On Wednesday, Cricket Australia banned Smith and vice-captain David Warner, the alleged mastermind of the entire episode, for a year each; Bancroft cannot pull on the Australian shirt for nine months. Interestingly, no cricket questions were asked during the press conference. 

Not that Australia’s position in the Cape Town Test would’ve allowed Smith to respond to any cricketing queries with sanguinity. Still, when a presser at a crucial juncture in a box-office series features no questions on cricket, it is a rude comment on the level the sport has sunk to. Which was, of course, grossly unfair to South Africa, who conducted themselves with great professionalism and put on a breathtaking cricketing show. And even more unjust to New Zealand, who routed England some 12,000 km away in Auckland, exhibiting a unique geniality the Aussies would find impossible to replicate.  

Imaging: Ajay Mohanty

The absence of real cricket talk during peak cricket season has become quite the norm. The build-up to the third South Africa-Australia Test was drowned out by the outrage caused by the one-match ban handed to Kagiso Rabada. The Proteas pacer was charged for a physical altercation with Smith during the second Test in Port Elizabeth, only for the punishment to be overturned after the International Cricket Council (ICC) was widely pilloried for dishing out a penalty far harsher than Rabada’s actions merited. Earlier this year, when India was in the midst of an engrossing duel with the same opposition, generous attention was heaped on Virat Kohli, not for his batting but for his “overly belligerent” antics on the field. The Indian captain was fined 25 per cent of his match fee for showing dissent against the umpire during the second Test in Centurion.

More than anything else, the past few months have made one thing clear: the idea of cricket as the “gentleman’s game” is an anachronism. An elitist Victorian coinage that is hopelessly out of sync with the modern reality of cricket, where a climate of hyper-competitiveness trumps any calls for noble conduct. Stalwarts such as Colin Cowdrey, Rahul Dravid, Daniel Vettori and Adam Gilchrist seem like lonely torchbearers of an era that is rapidly vanishing from memory. And while Smith’s mea culpa is indeed commendable, there is no undoing the fact that he has torched Australia’s cricketing reputation. His “brain fade” against India was defensible, but his recent actions are a case of flagrant cheating.

Australia’s cricket culture is massively responsible for this turmoil. “We should treat this as an opportunity to examine the culture that we’ve been seeing in the Australian team for a few years now,” says John Buchanan, who led the side to two successive World Cup titles as coach. Truculent and win-at-all-cost, the approach that Buchanan alludes to has seen Australia achieve dramatic success, but has also routinely spilled over to cause major international embarrassment. “We need to tell kids that winning is important; but the way you achieve it is even more important,” says former Indian spinner Bishan Singh Bedi. “This is a real tragedy.” No one espouses this merciless attitude central to the Aussie way of competing more than Warner. “Warner really needs to take a good hard look at himself. He simply cannot go on like this,” adds Buchanan.

The sordid saga has hit fans in Australia all the harder because the country prides itself as a first-rate sporting power, which remains an undeniable truth. Moreover, nothing unites the Aussies like cricket. “Things have to change from the junior levels itself. The players that Australia produces are so good anyway. You genuinely wonder why they would do something like this,” says a former Indian spinner on condition of anonymity. For all his ruthlessness, it is unthinkable that a Kohli would even dream of attempting what the Aussies risked. “We have become more competitive over the years but, in India, we still look at sport very differently,” adds the spinner.

Cricket is perhaps more prone to such transgressions because it involves a grey area in the form of equipment. Unlike in athletics, cricket goes beyond a player and his body. The sport’s relatively less pressing physical demands ensure that doping cases are rare. Instead, players try to gain an advantage through the stuff in their kitbags. In Australia’s case, the ball tampering arose from desperation — they were being battered in a game hugely significant to the outcome of the series.

In this furore over player behaviour, it is easy to forget the role of the ICC. Or the lack of it, in this case. Cricket Australia deserves applause for its exemplary meting out of punishment to the three accused. The ICC, though, first banned Smith for just one game and fined him 100 per cent of his match fee. Three demerit points were added to Bancroft’s name, and he had to part with 75 per cent of his match fee. There were no sanctions against Warner or coach Darren Lehmann (who announced his decision to step down from his position in a needlessly mawkish press conference on Thursday).

“The punishment from the ICC should have been stricter. What has happened is very evident. It seems everyone was in on this,” feels former India captain Ajit Wadekar.  

The ICC, over the past few years, has done little to arrest the slide in the sport’s standards. Its demerit points system ensures a player is suspended for one Test or two ODIs or two T20s, whichever comes first, if he picks up four demerit points (which amount to two suspension points) during a 24-month window. For starters, the evaluation period is far too long, and the punishments either too lenient or too harsh. In August 2017, for instance, Ravindra Jadeja was given three demerit points for throwing the ball at Sri Lanka’s Malinda Pushpakumara in a “dangerous manner” after fielding it off his own bowling, the same penalty Bancroft received in Cape Town. Jadeja’s was a fairly innocuous, quite common act; Bancroft’s was a rare case of premeditated misdemeanour.

John Buchanan. Photo: Reuters

Moreover, different match officials look at each offence differently, a deficiency the new system, when introduced in 2016, hoped to overcome. Rabada, for example, was adjudged by the umpires to have given Smith a send-off before barging into him. When ICC officials later revisited the event, they thought otherwise. “The ICC has to be a little flexible and must look at each incident in isolation, because the circumstances are different all the time,” says a former Indian umpire.

Ball tampering is a systematised epidemic, a fact that several umpires have acknowledged in the past. Australia finds itself in so much trouble simply because the job was done so clumsily that it would have made Shahid Afridi, who once put his incisors to good effect to “fix” the ball, shake his head in bewilderment. Merely reacting to such acts is proving to be inadequate; the ICC must strike this menace at its roots. “The ICC has become a laughing stock. It has been accused of hypocrisy in the past and, quite frankly, no one has any faith in it. It has to fix itself,” feels the former spinner quoted earlier.

On Thursday, ICC CEO Dave Richardson said the body would “undertake a wide-ranging review into player behaviour, the code of conduct and the framework for penalties on offences in order to bring a long-term positive impact on the game”.

It would also do well to take a leaf out of UEFA’s playbook. Since 2008, European football’s governing body has in place the “Respect” campaign, whose objective is to work towards unity and respect across gender, race, religion and ability. Fair play remains one of its core principles.

Once the dust settles on the scandal, Australia will begin to truly understand the enormity of the situation. Australia without Smith and Warner for a year is like India being unable to call on Kohli and Mahendra Singh Dhoni, or Barcelona having to play minus Lionel Messi and Andrés Iniesta. For a year. It is unthinkable. And scary.

Till a week ago, Smith, a fidgety, scrappy version of Don Bradman, seemed well on his way to Test batting immortality. No longer. The purists can scoff, but the bobbing head and the twitchy hands will be seriously missed. If Smith was the entrée, then the enigmatic Warner was the amuse-bouche that tickled your palate. Moreover, with Lehmann gone, they have to look for a new chef, one who can restore urgently needed credibility in the Aussie cookhouse. One can only hope that Justin Langer, apparently the frontrunner to succeed Lehmann, doesn’t get the job. Once, in a Test match in Sri Lanka, Langer deliberately knocked the bails off while walking past the stumps, and then sheepishly looked on as his teammates appealed for hit-wicket.

In the past, players charged with ball tampering have gone on to enjoy stellar careers, but then none were banned for as long as a year. Michael Atherton, Waqar Younis, Sachin Tendulkar and Faf du Plessis all recovered successfully from their respective misdeeds. Among players suspended for lengthier periods, only two success stories emerge: Herschelle Gibbs and Marlon Samuels. At 28 and 31, respectively, it would be stupid to assume that Smith and Warner are spent forces.

As for Bancroft, the immediate beneficiary of his expulsion is Matt Renshaw, who was dropped ahead of the Ashes late last year, but has now flown to South Africa to take his place in the squad. More importantly, the next time Bancroft tries slipping something down his underpants, he should remember that other things can slip away with it. Like a chance to play for your country.