Sandpaper gate farce and why ball tampering needs to be legalized

Sandpaper gate & Cricket Australia's verdict

In a week where England stumbled to a mere 58 all out versus New Zealand and South Africa's Morne Morkel decided to hang his boots, everyone was focused on a completely different incident. The videos of Aussie opener Cameron Bancroft using a yellow object on the ball and later trying to sneak it into his trousers generated a lot of outage. Personally, I saw the video and was extremely pissed. Captain Steve Smith's statements from the end of day's press conference were on the same lines as his statement after the "Brain fade" incident against India last year.

In my mind, it was clear that the Australian team was regularly pushing the limits on the laws of the game and there was a need of an ICC review of the incidents from the recent past. After all, Daryl Harper's email from 2016 showed that he had concerns about Smith and David Warner. Even while playing for Australia, every series has had a fair share of controversies and even in the Cape Town test, this wasn't the only ball-related incident. Don't get me wrong - I don't think other teams are holier than Australia, after all England have had many such incidents and gotten away almost every time. But I did think that if nothing else, this should have resulted in an investigation or some sort of a review.

However, the ICC decided to ban Steve Smith for 1 test (consistent with ICC's rules for ball tampering), while Cameron Bancroft was simply fined 75% of his match fees. This was a farce after Smith had admitted that the 'leadership group' (meaning other individuals in the team) knew about this plan. Even at club cricket level, the bowlers know who is working on the ball and how. After Bancroft's antics were shown on the big screen, Lehmann was caught on camera sending a message via Peter Handscomb - yet the ICC did not want to investigate this matter any further.

With public outage at a new high, Cricket Australia decided to step in. With the sponsors pulling out, chief executive James Sutherland needed to act tough just to prove a point. And just for that, there is a chance that we might have seen the end of two established cricketing careers and a youngster finding his stride. If Sutherland really wanted to get the team back on track as he claims, Cricket Australia would have spent more time to talk to all recent players and support staff. They should have discussed matters of ethics and tried to analyze if there was a cultural problem or if this was a one-off incident.

Instead, Sutherland was trying to save the board's face in front of broadcasters and sponsors and made the trio look like the bad apples of the team by serving them with extremely harsh penalties. While some people believe that CA has set a precedent to anyone looking to cheat in this manner - the truth is this was CA's discretion and other boards will only be forced to follow ICC's rules and not required to match the actions of this case. And that is exactly why, banning these players does little to stop such incidents.

Importance of legalization

I have been an advocate for legalization of ball tampering and here are the primary reasons:

1. A swinging ball makes Cricket more exciting to watch

Across the world, just as the bats are better day by day, every country has ample grounds where scoring runs is easy. Teams often look to play out the new ball and know that it will be easy to bat after the first 20-odd overs. Conditioning the ball makes it (reverse) swing and that too well after the ball stops swinging conventionally. This leads to so many exciting sessions where the balance of the match completely shakes up. Teams batting comfortably with scores of 150-220 for the loss of 2 or 3 wickets suddenly find themselves in trouble. It makes test cricket fun to watch and good batsmen around the world are thoroughly tested.

So if we can increase the chances of producing such exciting sessions, why is there a problem with that?

2. Too many grey areas between ball 'management' and ball tampering

Under the Laws of Cricket - Law 42.3, to be precise - players are allowed to "polish the ball provided that no artificial substance is used." The problem is there is no clarity on what constitutes an 'artificial substance'. Almost all players use lip balm, gatorade, mints and all kinds of chewing gum and while applying them directly might be illegal, a player can always put on some lip balm and then work on the ball an over later. Additionally, even when a cricketer does something wrong, such as stepping on the ball, it is hard to determine if it was a deliberate attempt to tamper with the ball or simply a mistake.

That is why even legends like Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid have been caught on the wrong side of the law. To clarify, I don't mean to say that ICC should allow players to do whatever they like with the ball, but ICC needs to come up with a set of detailed guidelines as to what is allowed and what is not. In my opinion, applying gums, mints or lip balm should be allowed while using zippers, sandpaper or spikes from the shoes should have strict consequences. This will make it even for all teams by making it hard to cheat without being caught on camera and there will be no need for useless debates around "The Spirit of Cricket" every other day of the week.