A MOMENT OF MADNESS

An excerpt from the first chapter of The Bull - Daring to be Different

It’s party Saturday in Cape Town in 2018. The crowd is large, lively and irreverent. Green wigs and watermelon helmets abound. Others arrive in night gowns and negligees. On the grassy mounds at square

leg, almost 100 members of the Kepler Wessels Appreciation Society are dressed as marines. The trains slow in and out of Newlands station; the drivers keen to catch a mid-afternoon score, or better still, a ball or two. Suddenly a wave of widespread booing begins and builds into a crescendo. On the main, giant scoreboard looking towards Table

Mountain, images are shown of a lone Australian fieldsman vigorously rubbing the ball with something yellow before hurriedly stuffing it down the front of his trousers. It’s Cameron Bancroft, a tenderfoot in only his eighth Test. Cricket’s sandpaper scandal is erupting.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ calls Australia’s coach Darren Lehmann to team reserve Peter Handscomb in the downstairs dugout, via a walkie-talkie. 

Mitchell Starc is at the top of his mark at the member’s end, looking to start over No. 43, when the umpires Richard Illingworth and Nigel Llong consult. They’d been tipped off by the third umpire, fellow Englishman Ian Gould. ‘Boys,’ says Gould on his walkie talkie. ‘Take a deep breath, stay calm and step away from the players.’

He explains how video footage has caught Bancroft tampering with the ball. Up to a dozen SuperSport cameras had been on high alert, filming his every move, from every angle. Upstairs, Lehmann looks on in disbelief. He’d always had total faith in the team and its leaders. It was part of his big brother-type management style. Surely no-one could trash the game’s reputation, so brazenly.

Gould had been warned pre-match that the Australians were working too aggressively on the condition of the ball and the umpiring team involved in the first two Tests had informal talks with the host broadcasters asking for their camera crew to be particularly vigilant. ‘You’re on Warner watch,’ they’re told.

Our Australian Cricket Society tourists are in the plush seats, just below the press box, under cover with uninterrupted view-lines directly down the pitch. Bancroft is the only fieldsman in front of the wicket

on the offside. As the umpires challenge him, captain Steve Smith runs 40 metres from second slip to join them. Asked to empty his pockets, Bancroft produces only a black sunglasses cover. But the jeering intensifies again as earlier images are replayed of him turning his back on the umpires and quickly sliding something down his trousers. The cameraman on the cover point boundary had captured everything beautifully. ‘It looked terrible,’ said wicketkeeper Tim Paine. ‘A sense of dread came over us all.’ Smith returns to the slips, clearly agitated and mutters to no-one in particular: ‘There’s (going to be) trouble here’.

The replays and the booing continues. There are more than 10,000 in, including about 1000 holidaying Australians. We’re all stunned.

SOUTH AFRICA had controlled the game all match. Its champion AB de Villiers had opened his score with an exhilarating six straight over the extra cover rope, prompting a sharp retort from the bowler, Pat Cummins. De Villiers followed him down the wicket and more words were exchanged. This series had been the tersest since Bodyline. Tempers often boiled over when South Africa played Australia, but this was at a new high-octane, personal level. It was war without weapons.

Weeks earlier at Kingsmead, amidst a scintillating spell from Starc, de Villiers had accused Australia’s ball-shiner David Warner of tampering with the ball, encouraging abnormally extravagant in-swing.

‘Are you accusing me of cheating AB?’ says Warner. ‘You’re doing something to the ball.’6

Warner, so often the villain, had his left thumb and palm engulfed in a huge, protective bandage. He spent copious minutes shining the ball directly onto the bandage. The ball veered drunkenly from the 25th over. Later, ABC broadcasting doyen Jim Maxwell wondered if sandpaper has been used but gone undetected. Australia’s behavior was appalling. Both teams were at a short fuse and accused each other of ball tampering.

At Kingsmead, debutant Aiden Markram was targeted incessantly, Australia’s ‘chirping’ so rude and nasty that word got back to the ‘Godfather’ of South African cricket Dr. Ali Bacher. He wrote to captain Faf du Plessis saying the very essence of the sport was being violated. ‘If all this sledging continues to happen, I suggest you walk off,’ he says.

On the final day de Villiers was brilliantly run out by Warner after a miscommunication with Markram and Nathan Lyon, at the bowler’s end, wantonly dropped the ball on a crestfallen de Villiers as he lay prostrate on his back before running to join his elated teammates. The cameras switched to Warner and his wild, unbridled celebration. He almost needed to be held back from a crestfallen Markram, who blinked in astonishment, as did several of Warner’s own teammates.

Earlier in the match, Warner had become enraged after a coarse exchange with South Africa’s Quinton de Kock, the Australian claiming de Kock had made snide comments about his wife Candice, involved years earlier in a messy, much-regretted night with champion rugby cross-coder Sonny Bill Williams. The South Africans claimed de Kock had purely been retaliating.

Australia’s delinquent behavior had for years been nettling everyone: opponents and its own public. It was as if our elite XI somehow felt they were entitled, untouchable, above the law. Winning masked all sins. So much for the integrity and culture of the game.

At Australia’s luxury Cape Town hotel, the Cullinan, Smith fielded a phone call from faraway Jolimont, Cricket Australia’s front office. The caller was furious and said Lyon’s act was intolerable. The spirit of the game had been belittled like rarely before. ‘We’d just run out the best player in the world,’ answered Smith. ‘He (Lyon) can do what he likes.’

At famed St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) – the long-time home of the legendary Pollock brothers – South Africa squared the series, fast bowler Kagiso Rabada the matchwinner with 11 wickets.

However, his shoulder charge on Smith and an unsavory earful of abuse against Warner after his dismissal dominated the headlines. The Australians were amazed when the South Africans successfully appealed Rabada’s two-Test suspension for getting physical with Smith. His aggression often bubbled over. Only weeks earlier he’d been sanctioned for a similar misdemeanor.

Ten days later, on the first morning at Newlands, several South African board executives were pictured with fans wearing Sonny Bill masks. The photographs were splashed all over the internet and social media channels. Warner returned to the team’s hotel that night to find Candice in tears.

The Australians ran second all match and when Warner was castled by Rabada, he walked back up the incline into the Western Province CC grandstand to concerted jeering. One man leapt from his seat and started berating Warner. The Australian momentarily paused, returned fire… and kept walking. Watching from the stands, Warner’s wife Candice and her brother Patty were aghast, Patty leaving his seat and accosting the loudmouth, who was soon ejected. Candice reckoned there was little protection or support for the players. ‘It felt like we’d been hung out to dry,’ she was to say in her 2023 memoir.