Scandal that broke Aussies’ spirit

When it all went down in Cape Town, one Test player stood up and offered a solution. His teammates didn’t listen.

Cameron Bancroft and Steve Smith talk to the umpires during the infamous Cape Town Test in 2018 Picture: AP

When it all went down, one Test player stood up and told his teammates that if they stuck together they’d get through this, but it was too late – they were already coming apart and by the looks of the past week, that same dynamic is at hand.

There was a lot of advice and panic around the Australian dressing rooms as darkness descended across Cape Town and the reality of what had just occurred began to dawn on the parties involved.

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Management was trying to work out a strategy to handle the situation.

Rejecting warnings that this could be dealt with in the morning, Steve Smith and Bancroft, accompanied by team manager, Gavin Dovey, marched across the field to the waiting media.

Security manager Frank Dimasi and Kate Hutchison were with them.

Caution was counselled, there was no rush, but Smith just wanted to deal with it and so he marched up the stairs to explain himself.

He’d owned up straight after play to poor practice with the DRS in India when Virat Kohli had implied he was gaming the system. It was the right approach. It took the sting out of the issue.

Honesty is the best policy and all that, but honesty was to take many forms on the day and has in the three years since.

Resolved to meet it head on, Smith and Bancroft inexplicably listened to somebody who told them that if they were to speak, they could not admit to using sandpaper.

It was a strange lie, almost irrelevant to the issue at hand, but they ran with it.

Remember that at one point before this, Bancroft had slipped out to apologise to the umpires. Lying to them on the field had not sat well with him so he set out to correct that.

In the rooms that night the players were unravelling slowly, some were starting to eye the exits.

Steven Smith and Cameron Bancroft, left, leave the ill-fated media conference in Cape Town Picture: Getty Images

Ball tampering isn’t even a major offence. You would be lucky to miss a Test match, but you can be sure that even though they said those words, it was without any real conviction.

There was a rising sense of panic, shame and anger. Long-distance stares and long silences. Teams fracture when the fight or flight reflexes take over and you could almost hear this ship creaking. People were eyeing the exits, counting heads and counting the number of seats on the life raft.

The Weekend Australian understands that one player read the room, saw the warning signs and counselled a way forward.

Usman Khawaja told the group they were a team and they should handle this as a team. Stick together. Accept the consequences of Bancroft’s actions as a collective.

No vote was taken but it is obvious from what happened then and what is happening now that Khawaja’s approach was rejected.

Who knows what motivated the batsman? One day he might tell his side of the story, but it is reasonable to speculate that he’d seen what had happened when the group had stuck together during the MOU dispute. Perhaps he was driven by a sense that there is a collective responsibility for the place they found themselves in.

Certainly the cultural review that followed identified something in the DNA of the entire ­organisation that led Australian cricket to this ignominious moment.

Nobody in cricket is keen to admit ball tampering occurs, but it does and this Australian team was pushing the limits in its desire to get the ball to reverse – just as the opposition were.

You could argue – and at least four of them did in a statement during the week – that they “did not know a foreign substance was taken on to the field until we saw the images on the big screen at Newlands”.

But that is a very specific argument. Specific honesty.

Bowler coach David Saker was caught in the fog at the time, but seemed to have found his way clear to a better perspective this week.

“You could point your finger at me, you could point your finger at Boof (then coach Darren Lehmann), could you point it at other people, of course you could,” he told The Age.

“The disappointing thing is it’s never going to go away, regardless of what’s said. We all know that we made a monumental mistake. The gravity wasn’t as plain until it all came out.”

Honesty is at hand, but it is not quite here yet. Too much has to be read between the lines, too much has to be interpreted.

Maybe it is time to wheel out Justin Langer’s “elite honesty” and really rip the Band-Aid off on this one. Langer, it should be remembered, had no role in this. He was WA coach at the time.

Everyone in that team knew there was “ball management”. How much they knew or chose to know is debatable.

Cricket Australia waves its Cape Town review around as if it some sacred text handed down from the gods.

In it lies the eternal truth, they say, but what is actually in it remains subject to conjecture.

Not everyone was interviewed and the world is being asked to believe the investigators when they conclude that only Smith, Bancroft and Warner were guilty of the crime at Newlands.

The events of the past week have shown that some struggle to accept this.