The Price Paid by Tim Paine

Author:Tim Paine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2022-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

9

SANDPAPERGATE

Where do I start with all of this?

What did we know?

Could we have stopped it?

How did things get to such a place?

Was David Warner a scapegoat? Was Cameron Bancroft the innocent party?

I remember the excitement ahead of the South African tour. Life was going along beautifully. I’ve just played five Ashes Tests I never expected to play and now they want me to do my bit for three Test matches in South Africa. We were up and about, we had taken the best of what England could muster and won the Ashes 4–0 and now it was time to take on the Proteas.

The circus rolls on. The fun continues.

It’s fair to say these series had developed a heat of their own. The cricket was always good, but on and off the field things often got strained. Australia had won the last series in South Africa and there’d been a bit of carry on. Then they came over here in 2016–17, beat us in our own backyard and that had cost a few blokes their places in the team. In that series Faf du Plessis got charged with ball-tampering for using a peppermint and they had a real tantrum over the penalty. They were roughing up journos in the airport and outside their team hotel. They flew in their chief executive Haroon Lorgat who took on the ICC’s chief executive Dave Richardson over the issue and went as far as to indicate that Richardson was part of a ‘ball shining brigade’ when he played for South Africa – a charge he has strongly refuted, but an indication of how low Cricket South Africa were willing to go.

Faf was one of those South African players who could rile people up. In 2014 he accused Australians of carrying on like wild dogs during a previous series so some of our boys howled like wild dogs when he got out in the next innings. In 2016–17, Faf rolled through an airport with a peppermint on his tongue which he poked out for the cameras to see – he was making a mockery of the charges.

To be fair to him, everybody used mints, but when others got caught they accepted the penalty. The South Africans seemed to think they didn’t have to and would behave the same way when Kagiso Rabada got suspended in 2018 (more of that soon).

Things often boiled over against the Proteas. I remember the clash between Dale Steyn and Michael Clarke in 2014. Pup lost it at the time and called him a cheat but was man enough to realise that and apologise publicly later, but it just showed you how heated things got between the two teams. Clarke was not the sort of player to say things like that. Steyn declared on the next tour that he wouldn’t forgive him for what was said until he got a personal apology.

Australian teams were always up for the fight, maybe even started their fair share, but if you listen to the South Africans they’re always the innocent victims and that’s never, ever been the case.

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