This is just not cricket!

Tweet

Cricket is in disarray in Australia. Grown men are crying on camera after they cheated in a test match by tampering with the cricket ball by roughing one side with sandpaper. They did this to get the ball to swing late , likely to get guys out. If you cheat in the gentleman’s game of cricket it’s the worse. The game is built on the ideals of fair play like no other sport. In truth international cricket has all but held the Commonwealth together through the bad times as on that field black, white and brown international teams are equal and get to beat their colonial masters on a very rare level playing field indeed. West Indians could bowl 100 mph to try and knock the Englishmen’s heads off! They did and enjoyed it. Australia were caught on camera cheating last week in the South Africa test. The captain Steve Smith, Vice Captain David Warner and bowler Cameron Bancroft have all received huge bans and the coach has resigned. They have embarrassed their country, fans and their families and sobbing on TV all week. But the problem is the bans are too big and unprecedented and so the guys will appeal to save their careers. My feeling is Cricket Australia is trying to take some sort of moral high ground here that ‘white people ‘ don’t cheat at cricket because most of the previous serious cases of ball tampering and chucking have been Asian cricketers, why the bans have previously been so short and so clearly not a deterrent. In fact the Asian led International Cricket Council that runs the game introduced a law where bowlers could bed their arm up to 15% so to allow certain Asian bowers with suspect actions to stay in the game, the rules quite literally being bent to aid Asian countries. It’s a fundamental law in cricket you bowl with a straight arm. Because of that bias white umpires did not want to risk calling Asain bowlers for chucking or tampering with the ball in fear of racism. I think the three players will appeal as previous bans in international cricket have been quite short for this offence, nowhere near one year and as little as one week in some cases. I think Steve Smith honestly thought they would get short bans if they were ever caught. How wrong he was. The Australian Prime Minister even got involved denouncing the cheating, the same Australian government who allow asylum seekers to drown off the north Coast of Australian. As Monty Python would say – ‘this is all getting rather silly’.