Australian cricket captain Steve Smith: a golden career in ashes

The cheating of the Australian cricket team in South Africa has destroyed Steve Smith’s previously untouchable legacy.

What a shocking fall from grace for Steve Smith. The cheating of the Australian cricket team in South Africa has destroyed his previously untouchable legacy, made untenable his position as skipper, earned the wrath of the Prime Minister and evoked a ­nationwide reaction of disgust.

He should be sent home following the Cape Town Test, along with every other bludger in that disgraced dressing room who knew about the ball-tampering plan but did nothing to stop it.

Ditto for the coaches. Nothing in sport causes more revulsion than cheating in any of its forms. We howl at offenders from other countries and now Smith is rightfully on the receiving end after ­instigating the single most distasteful episode in the 141-year history of Australian Test cricket. “It’s a day of national shame,” former Test opener Jimmy Maher said as Smith claimed he was still the right man to lead Australia despite the stupidity, arrogance and blatant rule-breaking in South Africa.

What now? If an entirely new 11-man team is required for next week’s final Test in Johannesburg, Cricket Australia boss James ­Sutherland should get on the front foot and make it happen. Sutherland can still do something constructive with all this. He can take a stand.

Malcolm Turnbull telephoned Cricket Australia chairman David Peever on Sunday afternoon to get a guarantee of firm disciplinary ­action. “I have expressed to him very clearly and unequivocally my disappointment and my concern about the events in South Africa,” Turnbull said. “He has said to me that Cricket Australia will be responding decisively, as they should. It’s their responsibility to deal with that but I have to say the whole ­nation, who holds players who wear the baggy green up on a pedestal … this is a shocking disappointment. It’s wrong and I look forward to Cricket Australia taking decisive action soon.”

Sutherland dispatched Cricket Australia’s integrity chief Iain Roy and high performance manager Pat Howard to Cape Town to ­interview the players and coaching staff before punishments were decided. The captain and vice-captain David Warner were both forced to stand down on Sunday night by CA ahead of any disciplinary action.

“This is a very sad day for Australian cricket,” Sutherland said. “Australian cricket fans want to be proud of their cricket team. And I think that this morning they have every reason to wake up and not be proud of the Australian cricket team. I’m not happy about this at all. I feel like Australian cricket fans feel right now. We have a responsibility to take this further.”

What an extraordinarily dumb thing for Smith’s team to do. At the lunch break on day three of the third Test, they agreed on a plan with unnamed senior members of the team — the so-called leadership group — to use sandpaper-like tape to change the condition of the ball. The colour of the tape? Bright yellow. As if that would not stand out enough. Bancroft used the small strip of tape to scuff up the ball to make it swing more than it should.

Ball-tampering is forbidden in elite cricket, park cricket, backyard cricket, any cricket. It’s in direct contravention of the laws of the game. It’s so obviously wrong that a 12-year-old school kid would baulk at doing it. TV cameras were virtually guaranteed to bust Bancroft, which they did, in what played out like a scene from Dumb and Dumber. The reaction at home ranged from disbelief to disappointment to frustration to anger. Smith is no longer best known for his prolific batting skills.

“I’m not proud of what’s happened,” he said before his predecessors in the role of Test captain, the job described as second only to the prime ministership for national prestige and responsibility, took aim. “It is premeditated cheating,” Michael Clarke said. “It’s blatant cheating. It’s disgraceful and it’s not accepted by anyone.”

Allan Border wrote in a column for Fox Sports: “It’s hard to explain your emotions when it comes to seeing the Australian team doing something like this. You just feel embarrassed and disappointed … they’ve got to suffer the consequences. It’s as simple as that. It’s like any situation, you do the crime you’ve got to do the time.”

Smith arrived in South Africa off a tremendous Ashes series in which his leadership and batting exploits were giving him approval ratings that Turnbull could only dream of. He could do no wrong. He was making runs. He was winning matches. He was breaking records for the number of broken records. He was sticking it to the old enemy, England. There was not a single blemish on his squeaky-clean image. No off-field scandals. He’d recently become engaged to his sweetheart. He was being feted as the greatest Australian cricketer since Sir Donald Bradman, the ultimate accolade, and he received The Australian’s award for Australian of the Year. His standing in Australian society, let alone the cricketing and sporting realms, allowed him to eclipse entrepreneur Dick Smith, medical researcher Sally Dunwoodie, ­justice-fighting author Chrissie Foster and nurse Kirsty Boden, the woman who sacrificed her life to save others during a terror ­attack in London, for the prize. That’s the sort of halo the 28-year-old was wearing.

Until Sunday morning.

“HE’S OUT”. That was the headline in The Star newspaper in London when Don Bradman lost his wicket for 232 runs at The Oval. Eighty-eight years later, Smith faces a more humiliating dismissal.

“I won’t be considering stepping down,” he said in a press conference at Cape Town. “I still think I’m the right the person for the job. Obviously, today was a big mistake on my behalf and on the leadership group’s behalf as well. But I take responsibility as the captain. I need to take control of the ship. This is certainly something I’m not proud of and something that I can hope to learn from and come back strong from. I am embarrassed to be sitting here talking about this.

“The leadership knew about it, we spoke about it at lunch. My ­integrity, the team’s integrity, the leadership group’s integrity has come into question, and rightfully so. It’s certainly not on and it won’t happen again, I can promise you that, under my leadership.”

Will he get the chance? Smith and his vice-captain were both stripped of their leadership positions by CA for the remainder of the South African Test. The incident has drawn comparisons to Trevor Chappell’s infamous underarm delivery and the bookmaking scandal involving Shane Warne and Mark Waugh.

This is worse than both of those, immeasurably so. Chappell was not breaking the rules of the game, just the spirit of it. Warne and Waugh did nothing to cheat during a match. They were just being greedy and foolish.

The most damning image from South Africa is of Bancroft standing in front of the umpires with his hands stuffed in his pockets, hiding the evidence.

“I’ve just had discussions with the match officials and I have been charged with attempting to change the condition of the ball,” he said. “We (Australian players) had a discussion during the break and I saw an opportunity to use some tape, get some granules from rough patches on the wicket to change the ball condition. It didn’t work, the umpires didn’t change the ball. Once being sighted on the screen I panicked quite a lot and that resulted in me shoving it down my trousers.”

There could be no more embarrassing episode than a guilty Australian cricketer trying to hide a banned object down his pants when he realised the gig was up.

“We have this yellow tape in our kit and it’s connected to some padding, but the sticky stuff is very sticky and I felt like it could be used to collect some stuff from the side of the pitch. I have been charged with ball tampering. I was in the vicinity of the area when the ­leadership group were discussing it. I’ll be honest with you, I was ­obviously nervous about it because with hundreds of cameras around that’s always the risk, isn’t it? I sit before you today and I’m not proud of what’s happened.”

Hard-but-fair is meant to be the mantra of the sporting side in this country that most represents the people. But the Test series against South Africa was already showing the Australian team in a poor light. They were -two-and-a-half Tests into a bickering, nasty, foul-mouthed contest before the cheating blew all other issues out of the park. Sutherland had already told Smith that his side had to be pulled into line. Not only did Smith fail to make it happen, he was up to his neck in taking the distastefulness to a whole new level. The South Africans were hardly innocent parties in the sledging wars, and crowd behaviour had been terrible, but Smith and Cricket Australia no longer have the moral high ground. When you cheat, all bets are off.

Smith, Bancroft and vice-­captain Dave Warner are at the head of the firing line. There’s been sympathy for the 25-year-old Bancroft in that he’s a new player doing the dirty work. but that will not wash with CA. He’s a 25-year-old adult who could have said no to a leadership group that did not have a leader among them. Squad members were seen laughing about it when 12th man Peter Handscomb was told to relay the message to Bancroft that he had been exposed by the television broadcast.

Peter Handscomb speaks to Cameron Bancroft to alert him he's been caught cheating. Picture: Fox Sports

Yet a long-term friend of Bancroft, former Test player Brad Hogg, was reduced to tears when he spoke about the Australian batsman’s role in the scandal. “He’s only playing his eighth Test match,” Hogg told Fox Sports. “He’s impressionable. He wants to find his feet in that particular team. He’ll do anything. He’ll go through a brick wall for his teammates, especially his ­leader. I think he’s been thrown under the bus here. He’s taken the responsibility. He’s taken the heat. He hasn’t blamed anyone else for his actions.”

A veteran of 56 Tests, Simon Katich felt “sick to the stomach” and said Smith, Warner and Test coach Darren Lehmann should all be sacked.

“They (Cricket Australia) have got no option but to stand down and then sack Smith, Warner and Lehmann. They’ve got no option ­because this was premeditated and calculated at the break, and those guys are in charge of Cameron Bancroft behaving the way he did. It’s a bigger problem than that, he’s been instructed to do this and anyone in cricket knows the captain and coach are in control of what happens in the team. I love Steve Smith ... but unfortunately he’s made a serious error and I think it’s going to cost him the captaincy of Australia.”

Trevor Chappell played three Tests for Australia but he’s only ­really known for the underarm ­delivery he rolled along the ground to New Zealand’s Brian McKechnie in 1981. It was a last-minute decision that prevented McKechnie from being able to hit a six to tie the match. His older brother and the Australian captain, Greg Chappell, asked him ­before the final delivery of the match if he was any good at underarm bowling. Trevor replied that he did not know because he had never done it. Greg replied: “Well, you’re about to find out.” Trevor did as big brother instructed. McKechnie blocked the ball and then threw his bat in disgust. Australia won the match but was booed from the field at the MCG. NZ prime minister Robert Muldoon called it “the most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket”.

On a day that scarred Australian cricket, one player had ­attempted to prevent it. Rod Marsh was the wicketkeeper. He folded his arms, shook his head and shouted the words that Bancroft or someone else inside the Australian dressing room should have told Smith at Cape Town: “No, mate! Don’t do it!”