‘Just be careful, they’re on you’: Inside cricket’s greatest scandal

“It gave us reason to believe we should watch something,” Naicker said. “Why would he do that? He was distracting from the fact he wasn’t doing anything with the ball, it was actually someone else.”

After a fiery second Test in which South Africa speedster Kagiso Rabada was charged for making physical contact with Smith, Crowe and the umpires took the two captains aside to demand they clean up their act 10 days later at Newlands with the series at 1-1.

Again, the edict went out the window and Australia, feeling a sense of injustice as Rabada somehow escaped suspension, careered closer to disaster.

What transpired in Cape Town has been well documented. Bancroft was sprung by the broadcaster’s cameras after lunch on day three with a small yellow object – later revealed to be sandpaper – and all hell broke loose.

The scrutiny had been on Warner, but suspicions piqued when he was moved from his customary fielding position in the ring to the boundary.

Bancroft had not been a person of interest for the host broadcaster until vision of him working on the ball with what he initially claimed to be yellow tape that had caught granules came to the attention of producers in SuperSport’s trucks.

“Not at all, zero, nothing, we didn’t have a clue,” Naicker said.

“Bancroft’s pure mistake was putting the sandpaper in his pocket and the cameraman zoomed in. We were watching it from glorious high definition trucks – you can see the yellow thing sticking it out of his pants.

“We could see through his pocket.

“What happened in Cape Town, to be honest with you, was pure luck. It had nothing to do with us going out deliberately looking for something.

“When Bancroft got the ball, he didn’t shine it on his pants. He started rubbing the ball on the palm. The cameraman stayed on Bancroft, he didn’t follow the ball to the next guy. When Bancroft put something in his pocket, the cameraman zoomed in.”

While SuperSport provided pictures from its broadcast truck for the big screen, it has no say what gets shown to the punters. As the footage of Bancroft carrying out his ill-conceived plan to hide the foreign object down his trousers was shown to the crowd, Naicker sensed an immediate mood change in the Australian team.

“You could see their shoulders drop, their body language, they knew there was something going on,” Naicker said.

Though Naicker is adamant SuperSport would have also exposed the home side if they had uncovered foul play, there was widespread distrust from the Australian team and ex-players, including former Australia Test paceman Brendon Julian, who was commentating for the host broadcaster.

“In terms of SuperSport, there’s no doubt they were following David Warner on that particular day,” Julian said. “I knew they were doing that. I was working with Graeme Smith, and [Shaun] Pollock. You know what the Saffers are like? They’re onto you all the time, even if you’re commentating.

“They knew Davey Warner was up to something. They suspected he was even doing something in the first Test. He had a lot of tape on his hands. He was playing it up to the crowd and showing them his hands.

“As soon as he went down on the boundary, they started following the ball. They put one camera on the ball. They followed the ball all the way around for the whole session. I was oblivious to it.”

Before play during a day of the first Test, as players and the commentary team mingled on the field to inspect the pitch during the warm-ups, Julian had relayed his concerns about SuperSport’s motives to coach Darren Lehmann, though he did not have ball tampering in mind.

“Just be careful – they’re on you, they’re trying to stitch you up with something,” Julian told Lehmann.

Warner would be fingered as the chief conspirator and rubbed out with Smith for 12 months, while Bancroft copped nine months, after a fast-tracked Cricket Australia investigation.

In the full glare of the watching public, it was an extraordinary gamble to take sandpaper onto the field. It backfired so spectacularly that the umpires, on inspection of the ball, didn’t even feel the need to replace it.

A match official told two sources the umpires did not change the ball as they believed South Africa’s was in worse condition. That assessment was a reflection of how poor a job Bancroft had done.

A more well-worn mode of ball tampering in Australian cricket was to rough up one side of the ball in the moments after one of the umpires dropped it near the rope when walking out to resume play, before whisking whatever device was being used off the ground.

This masthead has also heard examples of sandpaper being used in Sheffield Shield cricket but in more subtle fashion, with a tiny strip taped onto a finger or thumb, crucially in the standard brown colour rather than bright yellow. Sandpaper was commonly used in dressing-rooms to fix bats.

Privately, match officials in Australia described ball tampering as an “arms race”. Scratching of the ball had “been going on forever” at all levels of cricket, according to a player on the tour, with all kinds of methods deployed, from dried superglue on wicketkeeping gloves, to bottle caps.

At least one touring team to Australia applied superglue over the logo of their trousers to rub the ball on once the transparent adhesive dried and hardened. Lolly snakes were also in demand to stimulate thicker saliva with which to shine the ball.

The ICC penalty for ball tampering was effectively a speeding ticket – a fine of a few thousand dollars or a one or two-match suspension.

South Africa’s captain Faf du Plessis had twice been found guilty of tampering, for rubbing a ball on the zipper of his pants against Pakistan in 2013 and using a mint to shine the ball against Australia in 2016. He escaped a ban on both occasions.

“I remember even trying to use a nail back then and my nail broke … it was just part of the game,” he said in a podcast with former teammate Vernon Philander in August.

Watching the broadcast closely from the dressing room as cameras zeroed in on Bancroft, du Plessis was one of the first to cotton on to the West Australian working on the rough side of the ball.

“When I saw [Bancroft] do that I was like … ‘He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know how to get the ball to reverse swing’,” Du Plessis said.

“Because taking a piece of sandpaper out of your pockets, with cameras, it’s not the cleverest thing to do.”

One theory is that Bancroft was never meant to take the sandpaper onto the field but, urged on at lunchtime in Australia’s desperation to get the ball shifting sideways, had taken the plunge.

After Smith then ignored advice not to attend what would become an infamous press conference after the day’s play, alongside the opener, the blame game began. It was only added to by how Smith and Bancroft fibbed to the cameras that it had not been sandpaper, but yellow tape.

Back in Australia, Sutherland had turned his TV off before the scandal came to light, then was asleep and uncontactable until early the following morning, having left his phone in the study of his Toorak home.

“It was a serious ‘WTF’ moment there,” he said in 2018. “I’d like to think that my judgment, and possibly influence, would have meant that the media conference would have gone slightly differently. As we know, the penalty and the severity of the penalty, was to some extent related to not telling the truth, or not telling the whole truth.”

Some players, among them Usman Khawaja, made the case for collective responsibility, the argument being that “they’re not going to sack us all”. But as they closed ranks, unaware of the gravity of what was unfolding, they didn’t go down that path.

“I do remember ‘Uzzy’ saying everyone has just got to stick together, but a lot of other people had other views,” recalled one member of the touring group.

Australia’s bowlers insisted they had no knowledge of the Cape Town plot – and issued another statement to that effect following a headline-making Bancroft interview five years ago.

Other divisions emerged. In Johannesburg, where the final Test was played, one coach privately pointed the finger squarely at another member of the support staff.

Head coach Darren Lehmann initially tried to hang onto his job, but resigned tearfully at the Wanderers after watching how Smith broke down after a jolting trip home. As one player lamented of Smith that week, “the bloke’s made one mistake in his life and been shot for it”.

In 2021, former bowling coach David Saker hinted that culpability may have been shared more widely than it was.

“Obviously, a lot of things went wrong at that time,” he said. “The finger-pointing is going to go on and on, and on. There was a lot of people to blame. It could have been me to blame, it could have been someone else. It could have been stopped, and it wasn’t, which is unfortunate.

“Cameron’s a very nice guy. He’s just doing it [the media interview] to get something off his chest … he’s not going to be the last. You could point your finger at me, you could point your finger at ‘Boof’ [Lehmann], could you point it at other people – of course you could.

“The disappointing thing is it’s never going to go away, regardless of what’s said. We all know that we made a monumental mistake. The gravity wasn’t as plain until it all came out.”

The South Africans, who took a more carefree attitude to tampering, were puzzled by the scale of the blowback, particularly criticism from former players. “We were sitting there going, ‘Come on, guys, it’s not like you guys never did it’,” du Plessis said.

“Everyone has done it at some stage of their career.”

Manipulation of the ball had never occurred as brazenly, of course, as in Cape Town.

But eight years later, some on the tour and within the Australian cricket hierarchy at the time believe the full story wasn’t told.

As an incredulous prime minister Malcolm Turnbull conveyed his disappointment at the team’s behaviour to a shocked nation, CA’s integrity boss at the time, Iain Roy, was in the air bound for South Africa to conduct their inquiry.

Over the next few days, members of the touring party were called to a room at the Southern Sun Cullinan hotel in Cape Town to be quizzed over the events at Newlands. The exact number who were interrogated is contested, but not all players were questioned.

Some interviews were brief. Those who were central to the episode spent well over an hour with Roy, whose report has never been publicly released and is under restricted access inside Cricket Australia’s system.

Those who have read the report do not believe the public narrative would change if it was released.

But one former CA director, who deliberated on the sanctions, said there was a view privately held by other board members this was not the team’s first instance of ball tampering, and that Warner was the instigator in those previous occasions.

This director, who has read Roy’s report, accepts the board was not given the full story.

“We may not have been told everything, I suspect that’s the case, but we acted appropriately on what we knew,” the director said on the condition of anonymity.

“I’m firmly of the view Warner was the instigator.”

Another director told this masthead they believed members of the team were aware the ball was being tampered with but did not know sandpaper was being used.

Players were told by Cricket Australia there was a confidential hotline they could contact anonymously to give more detail about the events in Cape Town, but it was not taken up.

“No one talked,” this director said. “We’ll never know.”

Next week: A reporter’s tale from the series the spirit of cricket forgot

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