Seems to be mixed opinions on penalties here. I’m not big on cricket so really not certain realistically what penalties these guys would be staring at.
Are we talking suspensions, bans or just fines?
HAP - no problem, each to their own. You can keep your head and I will lose mine. This is blatant, pre-meditated cheating. It doesn’t matter to me how often it happens or who has done it in the past. To think it, discuss it and undertake it is deplorable. We already knew this team under Smith and Warner were poor winners and now we’ve proven we are poor losers as well.
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Lol to the thought that the Aussies have ever been held to a higher standard. That is a lot harder to enjoy than I would have imagined
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They should get a year ban.
The lot of them that were aware of it
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Over-reaction: the epitome of BB.
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I see your point HAP, but the Australian captain and his offsiders didn’t just cheat in the spur of the moment. They planned to cheat.
It’s a very significant decision for cricket Australia now.
It would be an exceptionally hard decision to permanently strip him of the captaincy. But there needs to be a significant penalty for the captain, moreso than any of the others.
It would be a very bad look for kids playing the game if there isn’t.
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And it’s actually written in the laws of the game that it is the captain’s responsibility to make sure the team plays within the laws and the spirit of the game.
I love Smith, but this is a disaster
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Atherton (captain of England) got caught tampering with the ball, only got 2000 pound fine.
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To the ICC, its a one game ban
In here, it’s somewhere between a life ban and beheading.
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I can’t help but feel betrayed by this. I’m really pissedat the hierarchy within the Australian team. They’ve let us all down.
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To be honest… I can’t quite process it. They were still in the match at that stage. Just seems a collective brain fart. A piece of tape to pick up sand seems so amateurish and ineffective.
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Surely you can’t continue to be the captain of Australia after you’ve made the decision to cheat and then done it. This is a disgrace. Just disgusting.
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“I am embarrassed to be sitting here to be perfectly honest with you.”
So spoke Steve Smith after three days of play in a Test match against South Africa, to a room packed with journalists racing to process recent events.
The thing is, that quote comes from November 2016, when an Australian Test side under Smith’s captaincy was demolished in a match in Hobart.
Five members of that team have never played for Australia again.
This time around, in March 2018, Smith was in Cape Town partway through a match at Newlands.
“I’m embarrassed to be sitting here talking about this,” was his variation on a theme.
Conceivably, we might again see five players from this Test miss some future Australian outings.
Except this time is much more embarrassing than being thrashed on the field. Every side is sometimes beaten, and well beaten. Not every side has to admit to cheating in a desperate attempt to win.
It’s hard to know how to lead this story. Australia is surely gone in this series. Smith may well be gone as captain. Australia’s claim to playing hard but fair has evaporated for years to come.
We’ve seen batting collapses, but this was a team falling to pieces. With South Africa forging a strong lead through the middle session, television cameras showed Cameron Bancroft suspiciously rubbing one side of the ball.
On closer examination, a flicker of yellow could be seen between two of his fingers. As the image hit screens, Australia’s coach Darren Lehmann hit his walkie-talkie to Peter Handscomb on the substitute bench, who went onto the ground and spoke to Bancroft.
Television cameras swarmed every detail. Then the final indignity: Bancroft loosening the drawstring on his trousers, taking a small yellow square from his pocket, and stuffing it down his strides before he could be questioned by umpires.
There was no doubt about what had happened, and the only shred of credit these players can take is that they fronted up to tell the story rather than having Bancroft punished and refusing to comment.
The most junior player in the team came along with his captain to admit that he had taken a piece of adhesive tape from the team kit, stuck some grit to it from the edge of the pitch where he had fielded at short leg, and used the abrasive substance to try to scratch the ball.
“I want to be here because I’m accountable for my actions as well,” he told the media conference.
“I’m not proud of what’s happened and I have to live with the consequences and the damage to my own reputation that comes with that.”
To centre the blame on him, though, would be unfair.
“The leadership group knew about it, we spoke about it at lunch,” Smith said.
The risk of doing the dirty work was delegated by the team’s most senior players to their young colleague.
Some forms of tampering are viewed more strongly
Ball-tampering, for the uninitiated, matters because damaging the ball in certain ways can give bowlers an advantage. The natural wear of the ball is as much part of the game as the wear of the pitch.
Scratching the ball can especially help bowlers get reverse swing, making the ball swerve in the air. Scratching it with “foreign objects” is regarded as one of the game’s sins.
There’s a hierarchy of ball-tampering. When players chew lollies to polish a ball with sugary spit, this is technically a banned “foreign substance”, but tends to be regarded as an extension of natural methods.
Indeed, the opposing captain in this game was charged for that offence during the aforementioned Hobart match, but the episode has not severely tarnished Faf du Plessis’ reputation.
Moves like Mick Lewis in a Sheffield Shield final scraping a ball on a gutter while retrieving a boundary, or Michael Atherton’s handful of dirt in his pocket, are a level up, but are still viewed with some leniency as impulsive.
This, somehow, feels different, innately and instinctively. As the story broke, there was sick unsteady feeling in the gut. It was a collapse of integrity, both structural and otherwise.
To premeditate tampering, among a group of players. To bring foreign objects onto the field. These factors prompted a more visceral reaction that this was genuine cheating, not just opportunism.
The looks on the players’ faces in the press conference showed they knew it.
“I can see that you’re absolutely distraught about this,” said SABC broadcaster Kass Naidoo while asking Bancroft a question. The young batsman was almost grey.
It is a feeling many of us know — doing something we know we should not, gulled by a convenient veil of self-justification, then the sinking feeling as that flimsy covering is stripped away. Self-reckoning is a hell of a drug.
But to take a step back, from those people advocating bans or sackings, it is worth asking why some forms of tampering are viewed more strongly than others. It is worth interrogating that first emotional response for logical coherence.
It is a difficult one. Sarfraz Nawaz is at once revered as the modern progenitor of reverse swing, and joked about to this day for his proficiency with bottle tops. We reference this in passing, as fun.
Plenty of the people expostulating about Bancroft doubtless drool over replays of Wasim Akram in the 1992 World Cup, swinging the ball a metre to demolish English batsmen.
No-one gets out of this unsullied
History has its great exponents of reverse, artists in the medium once it existed. But imagining that they stayed within the letter of the laws while creating that medium is fanciful. We accept both aspects as part of the colour and joy of the game.
International Cricket Council (ICC) rules do not treat tampering very strongly — it only ranks as a Level 2 offence in the Code of Conduct, placing it alongside David Warner shouting at Quinton de ■■■■, or Kagiso Rabada bumping into Smith, in this series alone.
The most recent few charges of ‘changing the condition of the ball’ have tended to bring three demerit points and a 75 per cent match-fee fine. At most players could get four points and a one-Test suspension.
What’s interesting is whether Smith and his aforementioned “leadership group” will all be charged for instigating this disaster.
Smith refused to specify whose idea it was to scuff the ball, and in the mayhem of the press conference, he was not asked which players were in his group.
When Glenn Maxwell was sanctioned by a “leadership group” a couple of summers ago, it was Smith, David Warner, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood.
But this Australian team barely has a player who is not senior. Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Marsh captain their states. Nathan Lyon has played the most Tests. Shaun Marsh is 34 and has been around for years, Tim Paine is 33 and equals Smith for the oldest Test career in the side.
Patrick Cummins is the only one who gets a pass. It does not take 10 players to make a decision, but 10 are implicated. No-one gets out of this unsullied.
As for the series, Australia is gone. South Africa is 296 runs ahead, with seven wickets in hand and two days to play.
By the time the Australians made a decision that will long outlive the relevance of its context, control of the match was already slipping away, and with it the prospect of a 2-1 deficit heading into the final game.
But coming back from this humiliation, with all its spectres and distractions? Avoiding complete surrender with the bat in this Test would take a miracle. Getting 11 heads together in time to compete in the next would take another.
And that is if the same team will even take the field at Johannesburg. If the ICC’s normal process won’t mandate suspensions, do not be surprised if an extraordinary process from Cricket Australia will.
Regardless of the rights, wrongs, or logical inconsistences, there is a feeling in Cape Town of great humiliation and a giant fall.
All it took was a little piece of tape and a handful of sand.
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No it’s not.
They are a disgrace.
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One game ban is fair but Smith must be forced to stand down
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More fool you if you believe any other instances of ball tampering happen without the captain ‘s knowledge.
this
Seriously, I do not understand why you’d do this… on so many different levels.
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You can talk!!
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Ha! 
I know, he was the worst. ■■■■ me, he used to bite the ball.
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And this is what sets it apart from anything we’ve seen before.
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