Australian cricket holds its head in shame.

Australian cricket holds its head in shame.


Oh dear! What is to become of Australian cricket? This morning the whole of Australia woke up to infamy, embarrassment, shame, notoriety and disbelief.  To think it's come to this. How on earth did it happen to such a clean living and respectable country who never attract the wrong kind of headlines and basically live for the moment when England come calling for a thrashing in the Ashes? But that was over two months ago or so and that's history.

Now though the most disreputable of all acts has visited the shores of our Australian friends. Who would have thought it? It was an act of such dreadful deception and corruption that even now we can barely believe the sheer brass neck cheek and chutzpah of it all. Here in Britain some of the more cynical English cricket supporters were sniggering into their pints of beer, cackling at the sheer impertinence of it all. Then they sniggered, chuckled heartily into their peanuts and resorted to gallows humour. It couldn't have happened to a nicer nation. Still it could have been infinitely worse.

What then was this cunning manoeuvre, this evil plot to undermine fair play and sportsmanship, this brazen display of cheating and illegitimacy.  Yes, Australian cricket has now been caught red handed, committing the most unforgivable crime in any walk of life. They cheated and cheated big time. They thought they could get away with it but then realised that nothing could escape the eyes of conscientious umpires and the ever present law of the land.

It all happened in Australia's latest Test match against South Africa. It was all going very badly for the Australians until that moment in your life when it all goes haywire. So what do you do when you're struggling in a major cricket Test match and maybe things aren't going quite according to plan? Do you just muddle along diligently until something goes right or do you just break the rules and resort to the lowest common denominator? The fact is that commonsense should prevail and you should just try to stick it out hoping that the pendulum swings in your favour. Not so for Australian captain Steve Smith.

So what do we do to characters like Steve Smith, those mischievous scoundrels, those double dealing misfits, those loose cannons of society, those scheming miscreants who insist on playing dirty? Or maybe I've got that completely wrong and it's all been blown wildly out of proportion and we're just over reacting.

Maybe the ultimate punishment should be administered to Mr Smith and his maverick chums? Perhaps we should throw him into the Sydney harbour or bring back those penal colonies so popular in the age of Ned Kelly. Smith should be made to suffer in silence, held to account for ball tampering. Yes ball tampering ladies and gentlemen. Steve Smith, on the afternoon of a Test match tried, in private, to change the course of a cricket match by trying to change the shape of a cricket ball in order to gain a clear advantage in a cricket match. This, you feel sure, is not the way it should be.

Yes members of the jury. Steve Smith, in wrongful collaboration with Cameron Bancroft, his otherwise loyal colleague, took themselves off to a quiet dressing room during lunch and plotted the downfall of the South African cricket team through the most illicit of channels. Both Smith and Bancroft who, up until this moment, were honest and trustworthy, showed a much darker side to their character.

With nothing but the smallest piece of tape, a generous helping of dust from the pitch and a good deal of jiggery pokery, both men conspired to cheat, misbehave and overstep the limit. In fact that limit was overstepped quite considerably and this outrage can never ever be tolerated at any level of sport. They rubbed, scratched, probably spat on the ball and generally conducted themselves in a manner wholly unbecoming of fair minded sportspeople. Quite why they chose to stoop to such low levels of degradation and foolhardiness maybe beyond our understanding but they did and no leniency should be spared. There you are jury I rest my case.

We all know that gamesmanship and one upmanship have been around in sport for as long as any of us can remember. There was the famous case of Olympic 100m sprinter Ben Johnson from Canada. Johnson took steroids, dabbled in the most appalling of drug taking and was promptly punished. In the world of athletics the ugly spectre of cheating has cast its glowering shadow of suspicion over some of its finest of all competitors. But now cricket, not for the first time, has been hung out to dry because two of its so called dependable  practitioners had a rush of blood to the head and just didn't think it through.

What would Smith's predecessors have thought of it all? We can only imagine what exactly the likes of Sir Donald Bradman, Lindsey Hassett, Warwick Armstrong, Alan Border, dignified cricketers one and all, would have said under the circumstances. In their day of course cricket was a game played by gentlemen, played in the right spirit, played by cricketers with legal minds, upright propriety and impeccable decency. There was never any of this fiddling with the rules or downright cheating in the old days because it quite simply isn't cricket.

But now Steve Smith and his Australian cricketing rogues have done something terribly naughty, the kind of behaviour we'd more readily associate with rebellious school kids in their last year. You know the ones surely. The ones who stupidly let off stink bombs in the chemistry lab or tied the shoe laces of the Maths teacher when they weren't looking, the ones who deliberately wanted to stay behind for detention because they really couldn't face mountains of homework.

Now Steve Smith has done the honourable thing and resigned as captain of the Australian cricket team because quite clearly he hadn't thought through his reckless actions. He thought the thoughts of a man who may have believed that the teachers weren't watching when elastic bands were ready to be launched and humiliation was imminent.

On reflection sport may have seen all of this before and maybe we should have known that something like this might happen at some stage and some time. The old saying of cheats never prospering is more or less a cliche but you have to wonder whether at some point Steve Smith will shortly be rewarded with a TV chat show or reality TV celebrity in an Australian jungle. This may of course completely wrong but how many advertisers, agents and high ranking media executives will be lining Smith up for regular exposure in the world of cheap commercials, endorsements for soft drinks, pizzas and designer shoes. It is an intriguing thought and one that is hardly worthy of any thought.

Still it's happened and it can't be denied. An Australian cricketer with an intelligent mind thought he could get away with it but didn't. He cheated and  they cheated again. They apologised and held up their hands. They were deeply sorry and repentant. They'll never do it again miss or sir. Please give us another chance. Cricket is the game they play on village greens during the summer. It's a game designed for white flannelled men in helmets and concluded with cucumber sandwiches at tea. It is a game with strict rules and regulations. Then the church bells ring and we all retire to gentle country pubs.

Sadly, the likes of Steve Smith have learnt the hard way. They've now discovered that  when you do something behind somebody's back the consequences can be pretty severe.. Their actions were those of the deplorable burglar who thought they could just sneak through your living room window and steal most if not all your worldly possessions  Well, this time cricket has, briefly we must hope, been charged and arrested with a crime that could have been so easily avoided. Perhaps Australian cricket should be firmly told off and reprimanded because if we see you cheating again we'll tell your parents and you'll never be allowed to come out and play. Do we make ourselves abundantly clear? Now go home and don't do it again.