Michael Atherton, Faf du Plessis and Steve Smith have all skippered their countries, but they share another slightly less honourable distinction – they have all been done for ball-tampering.
Atherton was caught with sand in his pocket, intended to be rubbed on the ball to rough up one side. Du Plessis applied saliva laced with sugary sweets to the ball. Smith, of course, got the raw end of the deal, being banned for a year for allowing Cameron Bancroft to attempt to apply sandpaper to the ball.
Other skippers have also fallen foul of ball-tampering regulations, like Dinesh Chandimal, who made matters worse by disputing the umpire’s decision to change the ball in a Test against the West Indies last year. Chandimal ended up sitting out two Tests and four ODIs, not for the tampering itself, but for his ill-tempered reaction.
Ball-tampering comes in different forms and some of it borders on legal techniques for shining the ball. Shining one side of the ball to aid swing is perfectly legal, but any attempts to rough up the ball are forbidden. Teams have been warned for deliberately throwing the ball into rough areas, but there are a whole lot of grey areas.
Some tampering techniques have a marked effect on the ability of the ball to reverse swing. Others, such as du Plessis’ sweets, have no impact at all and are a kind of cricketing urban legend. Players have also been known to apply other foreign substances to the ball, such as lip balm or sunscreen.
The International Cricket Council and guardians of the laws of cricket, the MCC, have done little research or even basic investigation into these techniques, but the sanction for all ball-tampering is the same. The ICC recently bumped up the sanction in a knee-jerk reaction to the sandpaper ball-tampering saga.
There are some within cricket that don’t view ball-tampering as cheating, but rather levelling the playing field between bat and ball.
The equipment used by batsmen has been subject to constant evolution, with bat-makers now able to manufacture bats that enable batsmen to hit the ball further than ever before. Bowlers still have the same weapons in their arsenal; an arm and a ball.
Fast bowling is an integral part of the game, but being a paceman is a thankless task that takes a terrific toll on the body. Regulations have sought to make obtaining reverse swing harder, thereby making life more difficult for quicks who possess the extraordinary skill.
The discovery of reverse swing has been attributed to fast bowlers from Pakistan – a country who hold a position of outliers from the game’s traditional elite, which helped to push reverse swing and tampering to the edge of allowable behaviour on the cricket field.
Even with a tampered ball, not all bowlers can achieve reverse swing – and perhaps a few small concessions on tampering laws could help to even up the contest.
The reaction to Smith and company’s indiscretions has made this nearly impossible, with tampering now firmly placed into the realm of ‘cheating’ in the minds of the cricket-loving public.
The flip side to this coin is the argument that the balance between bat and ball is not integral to the game of cricket, especially in the shorter forms of the game where the ICC hopes seeing the ball fly off the bat will attract people to the game.
Any allowances made to bowlers would likely be a simple redefinition of what constitutes tampering, but the current mood in world cricket would make this nearly impossible.
Written by @JonhenryWilson
