Australia lost their minds and judgment over ball tampering incident

The Australian cricket team’s ball tampering is hardly on the scale of Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France. Picture: Supplied..

What’s the difference between South African, Indian, English and Australian cricket?

When a South African player, Faf du Plessis, gets nicked for ball tampering (twice) he is made captain. When Sachin Tendulkar does it he remains a demigod. England’s Mike Atherton became a few thousand quid poorer. In Australia we assemble an ugly mob who bay for the blood of our cricketers and get to work with the four-by-two and a packet of roofing nails.

These distinctions offer an unusual look at national identity. Put succinctly, Australians lost their minds and their judgment over a piece of tape, some pitch dirt and a cricket ball.

I’m not sure I would refer to what happened at Cape Town between 2.00pm and 2.42pm local time as cheating. It’s an unhelpful term given approximately 99 per cent of Australians don’t understand the vagaries of reverse swing and how a cricket ball tampered with or not may suddenly start swinging around corners or stubbornly refuse to shift one millimetre off its trajectory.

It was not cheating by any legal definition. Broadly speaking, common law defines cheating as a contrived act set to deny people of proprietary rights. In Australia, where criminal law refers to cheating, it usually falls into the category of obtaining financial benefit by an act of deception. In the UK, where laws for cheating on the sporting field were brought in recently and used in the prosecution of Pakistan cricketers, Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif, Smith and Co.’s actions would not, by definition, rouse the interest of the plod.

When madness abounds, it is sensible to return to some measure of sanity by using the terms the rules stipulate. It was a code violation grade two (of four with four being the most serious).

On field, an offending fielding side faces the prospect of a five-run penalty, after which the umpires will swap the ball. The two umpires at Cape Town, Nigel Llong and Richard Illingworth, two of the best in world cricket, examined the ball and determined the beleaguered cherry remained fit for purpose and no penalty was proscribed.

During the period in question, where Bancroft was attempting to change the condition of the ball, no wickets fell.

These are important facts barely touched on in the media.

I was watching the game at the time, but I freely admit I was drifting into and out of slumber, so I am an unreliable witness. Given the hour, I gather there weren’t many watching in Australia so across the country people were left to judge something they did not see happen and only gleaned by way of several seconds of an edited lowlights package.

What they did see is certainly at the pointy end of the offence as it involved the use of a foreign object and a plan to adopt the illegal tactic discussed and approved by Smith and Warner during the lunch break and executed by Bancroft.

Unable to explain or quantify the offence, by late Sunday morning people veered into areas more comprehensible, belying a continental shift in gravity and sin to dismal parallels of match fixing and doping.

This was hardly Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France. It was an act of gross stupidity and I am inclined to forgive stupidity because, like cricketers and ball tampering, everybody does it.

I am less charitable when it comes to flagrant acts of conceit and hypocrisy, where standards of conduct are applied to others by prominent Australians they do not meet themselves. It was astonishing to watch politicians who haven’t wielded a cricket bat in anger since muddled efforts in their twenties or perhaps at all, condemning Smith et al when there are tyre fires burning in their own backyards.

Jeff Kennett strode to the Twitter stage calling for lifetime bans.

A disgrace of the first order. All involved should be banned from international cricket for life.
Australias sporting reputation demands immediate response from CA.
Reputation of individuals of no consequence

— Jeff Kennett (@jeff_kennett) March 25, 2018

He was far from on his own. Malcolm Turnbull got on the blower to Cricket Australia’s CEO, James Sutherland. It was reported Turnbull had called for Smith to step down as captain which would be of itself an astonishing jurisdictional overreach. Turnbull made no mention of it in a presser later that day but expressed his outrage and profound disappointment.

Not mentioned of course is that at least two of his ministers are under a cloud, one whose office is being investigated for the commission of a felony in alerting media to an AFP raid on the AWU’s offices in October last year.

Smith and Bancroft had at least fessed up where the default response from politicians invariably is to put the shutters up and lie low waiting for the fuss to die down.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten took 13 hours of waiting and seeing which way the wind blew before or expressing his disappointment at 5.00pm (AEDT) on Sunday afternoon. Shorten is nothing if not predictable.

Like all Australians, I can't quite believe what we saw last night. For the sake of all cricket lovers I hope Cricket Australia make it clear that this behaviour is unacceptable #SAvAUS #Auspol

— Bill Shorten (@billshortenmp) March 25, 2018

The commentariat went ballistic and has barely backed off since. Peter Fitzsimons, like so many others, demanded careers be destroyed and those responsible publicly crushed in a perverse 21st Century rendering of public executions.

Cate McGregor waxed lyrical about the death of beauty in cricket, summoning up luscious quotations on India’s Rahul Dravid, painting him as the personification of the spirit of the game. It was a lovely piece of writing only somewhat tarnished by the fact the saintly Dravid had been found guilty of ball tampering in Australia in 2004.

Overall the social media response was an act of collective sociopathy where due process was defenestrated, and disproportionate and cruel penalties proposed. It was an ugly lynch mob pure and simple which had lost any sense of perspective or proportion, brooked no argument, its outrage insatiable.

We could blame social media, I suppose, but in the end it’s the fingers banging out the words for display that lacked a skerrick of sense or any measure of humanity. It genuinely shocked me and I was forced to conclude that what has taken place in Australia is a whole lot uglier than anything that happened in Cape Town on Sunday morning.