Are the punishments handed out to Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft excessive? It depends upon the punishment in question. The punishment meted out by the International Cricket Council is broadly in line with precedent. Ball tampering is a level two offence and has been variously penalized in the past with a five-run penalty, the deducting of match fees, and the suspension of the guilty player for a Test. Mike Atherton, Waqar Younis, Rahul Dravid, Faf du Plessis, Vernon Philander, among many others, have been punished in this way.
But the argument that Smith, Warner and Cameron have been disproportionately punished (made amongst others by the Australian players association) is directed at Cricket Australia's sanctions against these three players which include lengthy bans from playing international and provincial cricket besides suspension from any prospect of captaincy for two years. Warner and Smith have also lost their chance to lead their IPL franchises and the very large sums of money they stood to make from their Twenty20 contracts. Is this excessive? To the extent that there is no precedent for this, the answer must be yes.
But is their offence such that this unprecedented punishment is deserved? Some commentators have argued that since this was a conspiracy to cheat led by the captain and the vice-captain that involved the suborning of a young cricketer (Bancroft), it was as wicked as — or even more wicked than — the spot-fixing conspiracy hatched by Pakistan's captain Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and the young Mohammad Amir during a Test in England in 2010. If this conspiracy to cheat by deliberately bowling two no-balls resulted in lengthy suspensions from competitive cricket (five to ten years) for all three players and jail terms, why should the present Australian conspiracy to cheat by sandpapering the ball not be treated as an equally grave offence and punished commensurately?
The short answer is that the Pakistanis committed a crime and the Australians didn't. Butt, Asif and Amir were convicted of a conspiracy to cheat at gambling and a conspiracy to accept corrupt payments. They were tried in a court of law and found guilty. Sandpapering a ball in a Test match is not defined as a crime by any penal code. Committed cricket followers might argue that this is a formal distinction, that in terms of cricket's own moral code, ball-tampering and spot-fixing are both forms of cheating that contravene the laws of the game and, therefore, should be equivalently punished.
This is a curious argument because there is a difference between cheating while trying to win and cheating by not trying to win. Competitive sport will always punish the latter more severely than the former because the point of competitive sport is competition. If a player deliberately bowls a no-ball or a wide or chooses not to take a run while chasing a total, it makes the match a charade. The reason why exhibition matches are so unsatisfactory is because the players involved are often not playing to win. It's why 'tanking' in competitive tennis is sanctioned so heavily. The argument that 'spot-fixing' is not the same as 'match-fixing' doesn't change the fact that for that moment, an external actor (a bookie or a betting consortium) switches off the competition.
Australian commentators, former cricketers and politicians have argued that the punishment was deserved, even necessary, because the guilty Australian players, especially the captain and his deputy, had disgraced Australian sport and Australia as a nation by their behaviour. Once a charge as broad as this is laid and the amour propre of a nation takes centre stage, questions of proportionality are hard to ask or adjudicate. So perhaps the important question then becomes, why are Australia's cricketing public, its prime minister and its commentators so angry and unforgiving?
There have been several answers to this question. One is the role of the Australian cricket team in Australian national life. The fact that there was an Australian Test team before there was a federal Australian nation is offered to show that Test cricket is constitutive of Australian national identity and not just any old game. To corrupt cricket is, therefore, to strike at the root of Australian identity. Donald Bradman's iconic, semi-sacred place in the Australian pantheon is another illustration of cricket's exalted place in the country's image of itself. Malcolm Knox argued in a recent article that Australian fans have been systematically alienated by the chronic bad behaviour, sense of impunity and hypocrisy of this and earlier Australian teams.
These are interesting explanations but it's hard to see how they explain the present moment. Cricket's standing in Australian life isn't new. If, as Knox points out, Australian teams have been marked by sanctimony and sharp practice for years now, why has this outrage been so long coming? If James Sutherland is so concerned about Australian cricket's reputation, why is Darren Lehmann the national team's coach? Before the last Ashes series, Lehmann declared he was happy with Warner's ultra-aggressive 'Bull' persona. This was after Warner told a cricket website that he "... might push the boundaries a little bit. Sometimes you know where the line is, sometimes you want to cross it. We'll have to wait and see."
There is a simpler explanation. Australian politicians, Cricket Australia and the Australian cricketing public were willing to live with sharp practice so long as transgressions could be denied or explained away. (This is true of all cricket boards, all cricketing nations and all cricket fans. As a thought experiment, think of how desis would have reacted if it had been the Indian captain and a junior player in that press conference in place of Smith and Bancroft.) So when Steven Smith was caught on camera in India trying to get illegal assistance from the Australian dressing room for a DRS review, it looked bad but he managed to explain it away as a 'brain fade'. The Australians indignantly denied that there was a pattern to this behaviour; they also insisted during the last Ashes series that David Warner hadn't systematically tampered with the ball. This isn't peculiar to Australians; offenders of every nationality either deny they 'meant' to do it (Rahul Dravid and Faf du Plessis) or are economical with the truth when confronted by match officials (Atherton) or admit to transgressing absent-mindedly (the Sugared Spit Defence).
With Bancroft caught in full HD using yellow sandpaper, then caught again shoving the sandpaper into his jocks, followed by Bancroft and Smith lying to the umpires on the field of play, denial became impossible. The fact that Bancroft had been encouraged to cheat by senior players meant that he couldn't, wouldn't take the fall for this alone. Which meant that Australia and the world had to watch Bancroft and Smith publicly confess to cheating (though they didn't use the word) on camera. It's one thing to cheat; it's another to get caught; it's a third, exponentially more awful thing, to be forced to confess in a press conference. Then the team, the board and the fans have nowhere to hide. 'Say it ain't so, Steve!' cried the cricketing public. He would have if he could and his fans would have crouched behind any fig leaf he might have conjured up (as they had behind that 'brain fade') but there was nowhere to hide: this was full frontal nudity.
Still, the Australians denied what they could. Smith and Bancroft compounded their dishonesty by claiming that the ball-altering object was yellow tape when it was actually sandpaper. Cricket Australia insisted that no one except Warner, Smith and Bancroft was involved. This despite the fact that Smith had referred to a broader 'leadership group'. It's hard to believe that expert fast bowlers like Starc and Cummins can't tell when they are handed a sand-papered ball by the player designated to 'take care' of it. James Sutherland, the CEO of Cricket Australia, bent over backwards to exonerate Lehmann. Having contained the damage to the extent possible, the board punished the transparently guilty trio savagely as proof of its (and Australia's) commitment to virtue. It helped that the designated dastards were easy targets: Warner has been a panto villain for a while now and Smith, going by his performance at the press conference, has the self-awareness of a tree stump. In a year from now when the dust has settled, the Australian team (including the returned penitents) and every other team in the world will commit itself to modern cricket's one commandment: You Shall Not Cheat...where there are cameras.
