Shame Australia!! Not for what Steve Smith and co did but for what has followed

ByFaizan Qadiri, SportsCafe Editor

03/30/2018

CHEATS. SHAME. CLOWN UNDER. SACK THEM ALL. SMITH’S SHAME. CAUGHT WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN. SMITH FALLS ON HIS SWORD. This is not Twitter talk but actual headlines that were used to describe the Sandpaper-gate incident that took place in the third Test between Australia and South Africa in Newlands.

After Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft admitted to ball-tampering, the Guardians of the sports of cricket, whether you like it or not, handed the Aussie skipper a one-match suspension along with some fines. That they were well within their rights to pull off something like that. “If a bowler is found to be guilty of repeated ball-tampering he can be prohibited from continuing to bowl in that innings. Following the conclusion of play, additional sanctions are usually brought against a ball-tamperer, as it is considered a serious offence. The captain may also be penalized, as he is responsible for the conduct of his players on the field,” reads the ICC code of conduct. The reason for that is that there is no rule that says that there are levels of ball tampering and as such the Aussie skipper was given the same punishment that was handed to his counterpart Faf du Plessis for what the media so fondly called “Lollygate”.

“What’s cricket got to do with a mob lynching?”, asked Saurabh Somani in his exceptional piece on Wisden India. And don’t let anyone tell you anything different. This was mob justice at its very pinnacle. What has transpired over the last week in the cricketing world reads just like a page from 1450-1750 Europe. To call Sandpaper-gate an outright witch hunt would be fallacious on my part but as the days progress, it does have a certain similarity to it. Don’t get me wrong, what Smith did was reprehensible. But what followed, after Smith’s honest confession, was something that would have made any person with a hint of a soul cringe.

But this raises a bigger question. Are our lives so intertwined with the concept of reality TV and the 24-hour media mockery that we will no longer care about the truth and can only envision the worst in people? Or even worse. Have we as a people lost the capability to think on our own? The recent coverage of Sridevi’s death by the Indian media was disgusting, to say the least, and almost everyone agreed with it. But all of that was done after the public were given the full week’s worth of “entertainment” by the so-called fourth pillar of democracy. The vile unsubstantiated stuff that was said and written, be it on air or on the Twitterverse, is a testament to how far we have strayed from being decent human beings. It appears that we have lost even the basic sense of empathy towards a family that has lost a wife and a mother.

The same has come up now with the entire Sandpaper-gate saga. Let’s get something straight first. The Australians were caught for ball tampering. This isn’t a case of doping or worse match-fixing. This is ball tampering. Every team that has ever been able to get an old ball to reverse has definitely changed the “conditions of the ball.” But the sheer hatred for the Australians that has come out on social media has been extreme. The trio, along with their country, have been vilified by the fans who made up their mind that the ICC’s sanctions were not enough. To put this into context, a person sitting in his office was adamant that the ICC, who are responsible for upholding the law of the sport, were wrong. Cricket Australia, too, felt that the punishments handed by the sport’s governing body were not sufficient and went ahead and took matters into their own hands so as to appease the fans and shrug off any blame that might end up on their doorstep in the near future. So they decided that the players should be banned for a year.

By no stretch of imagination can anyone condone ball-tampering and that is not something that I am doing here. Smith and co made a mistake. A deliberate and not thought through one which stems from the fact that every competitor wants to win.

Charles Barkley, a hall of fame NBA player, once asked his colleagues on a show called Open Court to stop being a hypocrite and understand the other side of doping stories as well. He never actually condoned the behavior of dopers but made the point that the competitive edge that exists in athletes who play at the highest level, sometimes drives them to doing things that are outside the legalities of the sport. Does that justify what the Aussies did? Of course not. But it does question the sentence, that is exactly what this is, that the trio now have to serve. And I can’t stress on this fact enough. They have been banned for ONE year for BALL-TAMPERING, be it premeditated or not. The three players have received the same punishment as Andre Russell for missing a dope test and CA, who claim to be one of the biggest boards in the world, decided to punish Smith for his honesty rather than reward him by reducing his ban. Because let’s be honest, had the Aussies not called it a premeditated decision, there is no way the Aussies would have opened Twitter in the morning to see the outrage.

In an era when Test cricket is struggling to find any sort of significance, fans actually had arguably the best Test cricketer in the modern era of the sports showing a level of consistency that had not been seen for more than half a century. From an Indian standpoint, it is a huge loss as well. After India reclaimed the Border Gavaskar Trophy last year and then put on a show in South Africa, the year ending series against the Aussies could have been a modern day classic. However, we now have to stare into the abyss and only imagine what could have been?

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Shame Australia!! Not for what Steve Smith and co did but for what has followed

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