Lenient punishments in past led to Sandpaper Gate, asserts Steve Waugh

In the month of March, the Australian Cricket was rocked by a ball tampering controversy which led to the subsequent punishments to three Australian cricketers. Steve Smith and David Warner were banned for a year and Cameron Bancroft was handed a ban of nine months from all International and domestic cricket. Former Australian batsmen Steve Waugh recently stated that when the boundaries of the rules are pushed, ultimately the situation reaches a nadir and then such incidents take place.

“You know they push the boundaries a bit by throwing the ball into the rough on the ground, which they shouldn’t do and then it’s escalated from there. It’s a shame how it got to the point that it did but I guess the authorities let that happen. There have been captains in the past who have been done for tampering with the ball and the penalties have been very lenient so there was no penalty for doing something wrong and it was always going to get to the case where it got out of control,” Waugh told ESPNcricinfo.

Waugh also said that sometimes the players tend to lose the touch with the reality and live in their self made bubbles which ultimately bursts and brings them to reality. He also gave an example for the same citing a statement by Steve Smith.

“They are in a bit of a bubble and they are protected, you know they are insulated from a lot of things. They’ve got a lot of people around the side that protect them and tell them how good they are and how everything’s fantastic and sometimes you can lose touch with reality and I think that was best summed up when Steve Smith said that ‘we won’t make that same mistake again and we’ll just get on with it’.

“They just didn’t realise how big a mistake it was and what they’d actually done. So that, to me, just summed up that maybe they were out of touch with what the average person thinks.”

Toning down a bit, the right hander said that Steve Smith is still hungry and having age on his side, he will have to overcome the people's criticism and then move forward with his game and regain his glory.

“I know that Smith will be passionate, he’s still only young, he loves cricket and he’s got that drive to get back there. His biggest challenge will be to overcome people talking about it, because the rest of his life someone will probably mention it once a day – what happened?

“So he’s going to have to mentally overcome that and find a way to sort of get past that but at the end of the day he’s an outstanding cricketer and averages 60 in Test cricket, second only to Bradman over a long period of time, and he loves cricket so I’m sure he’ll come back.

Waugh also believes that the Australian cricket fans will ultimately forgive all the three players and move on

“It’s really up to those guys. They’ve got to have the passion, they’ve got to have the desire but I think it’s a great chance of redemption. The Australian public will forgive and move on.”