Television cameras spied Australian cricketer Cameron Bancroft rubbing a piece of yellow tape on the cricket ball in a test match against South Africa in Cape Town on Saturday.
Bancroft later confessed to trying to use the tape and dirt granules to rough up the ball in an effort to change its flight. He appeared at a press conference alongside Aussie captain Steve Smith, who acknowledged that the team’s leadership group had spoken about the idea during a lunch break.
Cape Town-based South African cricket commentator Neil Manthrop explained in an interview with a New Zealand sports talk program, the Devlin Radio Show, how the cheating was exposed, explaining that the cameramen took the initiative to follow up on a hunch.
“They could see that something peculiar was going on,” Manthrop said. “They took it upon themselves. It wasn’t a director who said ‘Right. Get onto that.’ For them it was a personal triumph.
“You wouldn’t have picked it up from the stands. You wouldn’t have picked it up from normal television coverage. We had guys who were trying to do their job, filming the entirety of the event . . . It took some pretty skilled cameraman to pick it up in the first place.”
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Both Bancroft and Smith received fines for their role in the scandal, which has taken on the moniker of SandpaperGate. (A young fan tried getting Aussie players to autograph a piece of sandpaper the next day.) Smith was suspended for a test match and resigned his captaincy over the incident that left Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, “shocked and bitterly disappointed.”
“Our cricketers are role models, and cricket is synonymous with fair play,” Turnbull added.“How can our team be engaged in cheating like this?”
South Africa later won the test match.