“What happened was un-Australian. We play hard but fair. Always have, always will.” – an Australian on Sandpapergate.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
TWO days before it became a blaze of light and sound befitting last month’s men’s T20 World Cup final, the MCG sprawled and soared silently into the night. Less than 5km away along the tram route, in a common or garden pub nestled on a corner in Hawthorn, last rounds were called above the rattle of chatter.
Plenty of beer had been soaked up by three young Australian men leaning heavily on one of the pub’s tall tables. They were cricket people but, importantly, not T20 people: “Nah mate. Not that crap.” So a World Cup final happening down the road in the coming days mattered less to them than where their next drink might come from, and not only because Australia weren’t involved. And even if England might be beaten.
What did matter? “Test cricket mate. Boxing Day, we’re there.” This December 26 Australia’s opponents will be South Africa, who haven’t played a Boxing Day Test in Melbourne for 14 years. The series, which starts at the Gabba next Saturday, will mark the first time the teams have clashed in the format since their momentous rubber in South Africa in March 2018.
That drama started with David Warner and Quinton de Kock almost coming to blows in a stairwell at Kingsmead. It spun off kilter at St George’s Park, where spectators degraded Warner’s wife in cowardly fashion. That was also where Kagiso Rabada’s shoulder made what was initially adjudged to have been illegal contact with Steve Smith. The ban that decision triggered was overturned on appeal. At Newlands, Cameron Bancroft, in a plot masterminded by Warner with Smith’s knowledge and acquiescence, was caught applying sandpaper to the ball. Australians, including their then prime minister, took the dimmest view of the latter.
That that should stoke the ire of a certain kind of Aussie the most said more about them than they should want being said. They seemed less disturbed by the behaviour of one of their senior players. And by the shameful treatment of one of their citizens — who was blameless into the bargain — by boors in the bleachers. What swept them into high dudgeon was the exposure of their hagiography for what it was. Their hubris couldn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The shock in Australia that their players could do such a thing — “Ball-tampering?! Us?! But we’re Australians! We don’t do that!” — was met everywhere else by a dearth of surprise: “Ball-tampering? You? Of course: Australians are born cheats.” More than four years on, at least some of those feelings are undiluted, even by a long day’s drinking. Asked what he had made of Sandpapergate, one of the three young Aussies in the pub in Hawthorn said: “I was disgusted. I still am. What happened was un-Australian. We play hard but fair. Always have, always will.” It seemed cruel to disabuse him of the notion, despite the open and shut case to the contrary.
That thread stretched to Brisbane on Monday, when Dean Elgar gave his first press conference of South Africa’s tour. Most of the engagement focused on what one reporter termed “the infamous 2018 series”, perhaps to seek from Elgar an acknowledgement that the Australian response to Sandpapergate was justified. That was not forthcoming. Many South Africans considered the hue and cry a massive over-reaction, and sat back and watched smug with schadenfreude.
Or maybe Monday’s prize was a line from the famously combative Elgar that could be barbed and baited and hooked into a headline ahead of the first Test at the Gabba, which starts next Saturday. Or both. Fair dinkum: that’s what reporters do, whether or not they’re Australian. That, too, was not achieved.
Did the South Africans harbour ill feelings towards the home side? “None at all,” Elgar said. “It was a very tough time for all of us, even though we weren’t the guys who took the brunt of everything. But we were part of that. They were sad events, but I don’t have animosity towards the players involved or CA. They were unfortunate scenes but that period has long elapsed and we’ve moved forward.
“I wish things could have been a lot different. The history, when it comes to Test cricket between South Africa and Australia, is so rich. The competitive nature [between the teams] is very similar. We both want to go out and play a brand of cricket that our countries can be proud of. It was extremely juicy, even building up to that game in Cape Town. They were interesting times.”
What did he want to see this time? “Hopefully there’s no antics going on on the field that anyone gets busted for. But there’s always a bit of spice. We love playing against Australia. We’ve got a heap of respect for Australian cricket.”
Was he peeved at the players who had served their bans and resumed their careers? “Not at all. Smith and Warner are two cricketers I’ve played against for over a decade. There’s definitely no bad blood.”
On Tuesday, at an exclusively South African press conference, Sandpapergate came up again. Once. Malibongwe Maketa, who was South Africa’s assistant coach in 2018 and is now in charge on an interim basis, said: “A handful of us were involved in that series. I know it changed people’s careers but for us, on the other side of the spectrum, it was an unfortunate incident. And, where we are now, it’s way back then.”
Not in Australia, where it’s big news again. On Wednesday Warner abandoned his attempt to have his life ban from serving in leadership positions overturned because the hearings would not be held in private, which would amount to a retrial. “They want to conduct a public spectacle to, in the [independent review] panel’s words, have a ‘cleansing,” Warner wrote in a statement. “I am not prepared for my family to be the washing machine for cricket’s dirty laundry.”
Maybe Australians should listen to Elgar and Maketa, who essentially told them they aren’t special. That they had and would again stoop to the same sillinesses as the rest of us, in sport and everything else. That sometimes they would advance fair, other times not. South Africa, for instance, were done for ball-tampering three times between October 2013 and November 2016.
On each occasion CSA and most of the public defended the players involved — Faf du Plessis, twice, and Vernon Philander. There was no thought of punishing them to a greater degree than the ICC, as CA did to Smith, Warner and Bancroft, or even of castigating them.
Du Plessis’ second infraction happened in Australia, and the resultant storm elicited an amused awe from the South Africans that their hosts could take the issue so seriously. “The media attention and aggression multiplied exponentially,” Du Plessis wrote in Faf: Through Fire. “People attacked my character and my faith.”
There was a suspicion that things might have been different had an Australia player been the target. With the benefit of the hindsight provided by events at Newlands less than two years later, the South Africans’ wry smiles of 2016 would have broken into guffaws of astounded agreement that those supremely sanctimonious Australians really had suspended their disbelief enough to consider their players better than that.
The culture clash doesn’t end there. South Africans are amazed at what looks from afar like Australian cricket’s determination to inflict self-harm. There’s the Warner situation, and there’s Justin Langer commanding one pole of opinion on how things should be done — the old, bloodyminded, get on with it way — and Pat Cummins representing the other — the new, empathetic, be part of the modern world way. In South Africa, bitter and twisted former players and coaches disappear into putrid but petty puddles on social media. In Australia they become powerful media figures, as Langer has.
At a presser with the South African media on Thursday, Rassie van der Dussen admitted to surprise at Australian cricket’s apparent enthusiasm for undoing itself. He also offered what could be considered a cynical thought: “I see there’s a season two of ‘The Test’ being released, so maybe there’s a bit of that involved. Controversy sells and people want to stay relevant. Actions speak louder than words, and there’s a lot of words going around.” The documentary will hit screens in January, and will deal with Cummins becoming captain and the messy end of Langer’s tenure as coach.
Not that the game in South Africa is free of internecine damage, as was painfully made clear last year by CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-Building project. If anything, agendas compete more fiercely in the country than anywhere else in the cricket world. Every facet of South Africa’s society is afflicted by racism and racially based economic and social inequality, and that despite apartheid ending in 1994. Conflicts over race are never far from erupting regardless of the issue ostensibly at hand.
Because Mark Boucher was among a slew of whites appointed to powerful positions in December 2009, when several black and brown figures were swept aside, he was dogged by criticism throughout his tenure as coach. When South Africa lost, it was his fault. When they won, he was denied the credit. Boucher’s voluntary departure with a middling record after the T20 World Cup led to Maketa being installed in, at this stage, a temporary capacity.
Elgar has made plain that he pushed for Maketa’s elevation, and was satisfied to have “got that right”. When Graeme Smith, as CSA’s then director of cricket, appointed Boucher, he was slammed for favouring a friend. How was Elgar’s support for Maketa different? “Due to the short-term nature of this appointment, it was important for the director of cricket to get the input of the captain,” Pholetsi Moseki, CSA’s chief executive, told Cricbuzz. “So I don’t think it’s the same as the Graeme Smith-Mark Boucher situation as that was a permanent appointment.”
That’s the right answer for now. But if Maketa, a highly qualified and popular coach, lands the job permanently would he also have to endure mindless hate? Probably not, because the circumstances are beyond the blunt binary narratives that divide and damage debate in South Africa depressingly often. Elgar is white and Maketa black, and that means the usual poisonous nonsense would have nowhere to grow.
Australians who struggle to understand that should know South Africans can’t make sense of Cummins raising concerns about a major sponsor, Alinta Energy. They know fossil fuel industries have a disastrous impact on the planet, and that Cummins is a vocal advocate for action on the climate crisis. They also know CA have said the Test captain’s views aren’t why the company will part ways with cricket when their current agreement expires at the end of next year. What’s difficult for South Africans to fathom is that this could happen to a sponsorship reportedly worth AUS$40-million — the equivalent of almost two-and-a-half times the loss CSA declared at their annual meeting on November 26.
The space where Alinta’s logo sits on Australia’s playing shirts has been blank on South Africa’s kit since December 2019, when sponsors deserted CSA as push came to shove for a delinquent board. The suits who replaced that sorry bunch have exponentially more credibility and real world expertise and experience, but serious corporate backing has not returned for reasons ranging from what Covid did to South Africa’s already failing economy, to a perceived lack of confidence in CSA’s rehabilitation. So any player in South Africa who objected to the kind of money Alinta is pumping into the game in Australia would likely be told, by his teammates, administrators and the cricketminded public, to shut up and sit down regardless of what the company doing the pumping was selling.
In 2004, when Hashim Amla refused to wear, on religious grounds, logos advertising alcohol on his playing kit, his choice was accepted by many South Africans not of his faith. Given how impoverished the game in South Africa has become in the ensuing 18 years, if Amla had to make the same decision today it might be significantly less well received. Comparatively affluent Australian cricket wouldn’t have to confront that scenario.
Series between Australia and South Africa are said to produce compelling cricket because the cultures of cricket in their countries are similar, as Elgar argued. Closer to the truth is that differences between those cultures, and in the wider realities in which they exist, fuel fires on the field. The similarities are limited to superficial echoes. Or a means to an end, as Du Plessis wrote, “I realised early on that the only way to win against [Australia] was to match their aggression in order to neutralise their attempts at bullying you into submission.”
Doubtless the fires will burn again in the coming weeks, and with an intensity that startles neutrals. How high will the flames climb this time?
Cricbuzz
Bulletproof Truth 