Cricket

[Rorschach]

you people are not team players

Well we are and most of TEAM AUSTRALIA agree with us you can join the rest of the cheats, none of us want a bar of.
We have integrity and we respect the rules.

[Black Orchid]

Australia captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner have stood down from their respective leadership roles for the remainder of the third Test in Cape Town.

Wicketkeeper Tim Paine will act as captain at Newlands, with both Smith and Warner taking the field on Sunday.

Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland said: "Following discussions with Steve Smith and David Warner they have agreed to stand down as Captain and Vice-Captain respectively for the remainder of this Test match.

[Neferti]

The whole thing is unbelievable ...

[sprintcyclist]

The whole thing is unbelievable ...

yes, us losing .

supporters becoming turncoats

[Black Orchid]

You don't think they should be shamed for cheating, Sprint?

Aussies are better than that in sport.

[sprintcyclist]

Cheating ..............

that's pretty dictatorial of you.

what about '' making a less than perfect decision under pressure ' ?

[sprintcyclist]

SA 390 ahead

and hardly anyone here to support them, when they need it.

[sprintcyclist]

well, you should all be deeply ashamed.

We lost

[Rorschach]

I am ashamed... ashamed of the cheats and the damage to our reputation they have done.
I am ashamed they were chosen to represent us in the world as an Australian Team.

[Rorschach]

Price to pay for a team that must win at all costs
The Australian
12:00AM March 26, 2018
Peter Lalor
Senior Sports Writer

There is something rotten at the heart of the Australian cricket team. There’s no hiding from that now.

Something has gone wrong in that shifting dressing room and it was going wrong well before Saturday.

The public has struggled to love a side that wins ugly, but success and nationalism and tradition have patched the frayed fabric.

A conspiracy to cheat, however, has ripped the cloth and major repairs will be needed. The mend will not be invisible.

How do the senior players in the side find themselves in a dressing room and come to a considered decision to take this action? Desperation is one thing. The predisposition to act on it is far more disturbing.

Where were the adults in the room? The answer to the question is, sadly, that these are the adults. Or the nearest thing to them that the game can summon.

A sudden act of madness, like all profound disruptions and disasters, was a long time coming.

What happened in the dressing room is a matter of intense conjecture. Steve Smith wants to own it, but threw the leadership group under the bus when he nominated those men. He wouldn’t name them but the leadership group is he, David Warner, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood.

Smith is understood to have made a mistake in the heat of the moment. “Senior players” would have been a better term.

Starc and Hazlewood had nothing to do with this and have been slandered.

Where we go from here will be less informative than how we got here.

Ball-tampering has been a hot issue on the field this entire series.

Warner and de Villiers squared off in Port Elizabeth, the Australian heard to ask his opponent if he was being accused of ball-tampering. The South Africans were suspicious of Warner’s bandaging during that second game and the broadcaster that caught the Australians in their moment of shame yesterday was on to it too.

It was curious that Warner, who is in charge of ball maintenance, had given up the task and moved into the slips. He said they were dropping too many catches. His job went to Cameron Bancroft.

The South African players swear they saw the Australians up to no good at Port Elizabeth.

No good has been coming a long time. Cameron Bancroft is collateral damage. A not-so-innocent bystander playing just his eighth Test.

Bancroft was seen sliding what looked like sugar into his pocket during a break in play at the Ashes. There was some dismissive excuse for that at the time, nobody really cared that much. Cricketers have been using mints and sugar to polish the ball for a long time. When Faf du Plessis got caught doing it in Hobart last summer, his excuse was that everybody did it and Steve Smith appeared to support him.

Cricketers summon reverse swing by ensuring one side of the ball is clean and shining while the other is scuffed and bone dry. The scuffing happens naturally, it happens when a bowler like Mitchell Starc lands the ball constantly on one side. It can be generated by throwing the ball in side-arm from the boundary and bouncing it on the square. Umpires complain about this but it’s an accepted practice to a point.

All teams have an appointed ball manager who has dry palms. He identifies which side will be shone and which neglected early in the game. Reverse swing is key on flat wickets. Other team members are instructed to handle the ball carefully and to never get the dry side wet or throw it in so the shiny side gets damaged.

Nathan Lyon has clammy palms and has been told to hold the ball a certain way because he has often been blamed for ruining the chances of reverse swing.

Some of that is straining the rules; all of it is acceptable to the participants in modern cricket. Umpires recently called a captain in one morning of a Sheffield Shield match and said the ball smelt more like a bag of lollies than leather and they were replacing it. The situation wasn’t made public. A blind eye was and is often turned.

Damaging the ball with a foreign object is completely unacceptable. It happens at all levels, but usually it is a discreet thumbnail.

The Australians play ugly on the field because they think it is how they play their best. They are aware it turns people off, but they are prepared to pay that price. They are more devoted to winning than to doing what anybody tells them is the right thing.

It hasn’t sat well with everybody in the group. Some of the younger players were upset by the ugly scenes and baiting early in this tour. It has not sat right with the international cricket fans, overseas teams and some Australian fans for a long time.

Reaction from the international cricket world has been swift and brutal. The Indians were convinced Smith was involved in a conspiracy to cheat the DRS during the 2017 series in that country. These events will add to their suspicions.

Things got out of hand in Cape Town with the side under siege from the crowd, the opposition and the rod they had made for their own back.

As Gideon Haigh wrote, the Australians set fire to the kitchen and then found they couldn’t stand the heat.

Common sense got lost. And with it, all integrity. The shark was jumped. A black swan introduced.

Winning at all costs has become a lot more costly than the participants ever thought it would.

These bozos are our representatives, what does their behaviour say about Australians..? it says we are cheats.... .