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More to come out on ‘Sandpapergate’ story: central figure's wife.
Jon Pierik.

Melbourne Age.

Monday, 26 October 2020.

PTG 3304-16364.

Australian player David Warner's wife Candice has defended her husband's part in Australian cricket's ball-tampering scandal, implying there is more to a story that one day will be told in a memoir.  She spoke about the third Test against the Proteas in Cape Town while opening up about the pain she and her family endured on that infamous Test tour of South Africa in 2018.

She was questioned about that tour on an episode of 'SAS Australia', a program due to air on television on Monday night. One of several high-profile participants on the Seven Network show, she said when asked whether David had tampered with the ball or "supposedly" had tampered with the ball: "No. That's other people's opinion. He has never said his part”.

An investigation found that David Warner had instructed Cameron Bancroft to do the job, with the latter using a piece of yellow sandpaper that was caught on camera by the host broadcaster on day three of play. Warner had been the team's chief ball cleaner.

Skipper Steve Smith was suspended by the International Cricket Council for one Test and fined his entire match fee for "conduct contrary to the spirit of the game" for he had to take responsibility for the actions of his players, while Bancroft lost three quarters of his fee (PTG 2394-12130, 26 March 2018). However, a separate Cricket Australia investigation led to year-long suspensions for Smith and his then deputy Warner and a nine-month ban for Bancroft for bringing the game into disrepute (PTG 2403-12166, 29 March 2018).

David Warner has yet to fully explain his role in the incident and there are teammates who feel he ultimately carried too much of the blame.  His manager James Erskine has been approached several times with lucrative offers for his client to tell his side of the story but has so far refused, all parties agreeing this was the best result in the immediate term after a significant amount of work went into reintegrating David into the team.  Erskine said on Monday that Warner had kept diarised notes would more than likely publish a tell-all book when his career was over.  "There will be a time and place. At some stage, he will write a book”, Erskine said.

Meanwhile, former Australian fast bowler Mitchell Johnson opened up about his mental battles on the same TV program, revealing he had been diagnosed with depression since finishing his cricket career. Johnson, 38, retired after playing the last of his 73 Tests in 2015 but continued to play in white-ball domestic competitions.  Johnson admitted he had found the transition from being a full-time professional sportsman to life post-cricket difficult.  "I found out I have got depression but I think the depression was something I had even from a younger age," he said.

Unspoken, unexamined IPL decision a proxy battlefield.
Jonathan Lieu.
The Guardian.
Tuesday, 27 October 2020.
PTG 3304-16364.

Last week, the England and Wales Cricket Board (EWCB) announced it is in the process of organising the first official England tour of Pakistan in 15 years. This is, self‑evidently, the right thing to do. Since England’s last visit in 2005-06, Pakistan have toured this country eight times for various tournaments and series. From the EWCB’s perspective, their decision to brave the pandemic and send a team during the recently ended northern summer may well have proven the difference between financial ruin and mere recession.

And so naturally the decision to consider the possibility of maybe, potentially, exploring the idea of touring Pakistan for a very short Twenty20series in early 2021 – subject to all the usual security and logistical caveats – has been spun in many quarters as an act of supreme munificence. Yet if England are genuinely keen on extending the hand of solidarity to Pakistani cricket, then there is something else it could do. It could politely but pointedly use its voice at next month’s International Cricket Council (ICC) board meeting to ask why Pakistani players continue to be excluded from the world’s biggest cricket tournament.

Yes, the Indian Premier League (IPL), currently unfolding behind closed doors in the United Arab Emirates: a competition that likes to think of itself as the sport’s ultimate meritocracy, its global melting pot, a place blind to heritage or tradition. The cricketing embodiment of Martin Luther King’s vision, in which your little children will be judged not on the colour of their passport but on their ability to execute their skills in an elite performance environment.

Of the 20 countries represented in the IPL in the past decade – including Nepal, the Netherlands and the United States – Pakistan remains frozen out, ghosted since the inaugural season in 2008. (Azhar Mahmood, the sole exception, was technically a British citizen.) We all know why. Or at least we think we do. It’s something to do with security. Or politics. It just hasn’t really been explained, or even properly talked about, in about a decade.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty weird. Very few of the practical justifications for excluding Pakistani players hold even the slightest water. This is a competition that has managed to relocate its entire apparatus halfway around the world at a moment’s notice, creating a whole chain of rigid, biosecure bubbles across the Gulf. They could probably find a way of keeping Shaheen Afridi safe if they really wanted to.

In reality, this is a decision driven largely by ideology, nationalism and geopolitics: the dressing room as a proxy battlefield, the auction as theatre of war. So here we are: an IPL in the adopted home of Pakistani cricket, without any Pakistanis in it. And not by rule or decree, but simply by convention: it has always been and thus will it always be.

There are two points to make about all this. The first is that this is how power operates in its purest and most devastating form: unspoken and unexamined, implicit and invisible. You don’t ask. You just know. This, more than any amount of ICC politicking or revenue-grabbing, is the best way of understanding India’s influence over world cricket.  The second is that even if you set the principle of the thing to one side, this is so clearly a self-defeating arrangement. Imagine how much richer a spectacle the IPL would have been with the participation of Umar Gul or Shahid Afridi or Mohammad Amir, how much their expertise could have enriched others.

This is a sadness that works in two directions: the experience not accumulated, the wealth not earned, the lives not transformed. Indeed, one of the more remarkable footnotes of T20 history is the way so many Pakistanis have managed to bestride the format without the benefit of its pre-eminent tournament: the equivalent of an elite footballer unable to test themselves in the Champions League. Pakistani bowlers make up five of the 13 highest wicket-takers in T20 history. The Pakistan Super League has gradually managed to build itself into one of the world’s leading competitions. All this while effectively being placed under sanctions.

You might ask what all this has to do with England. After all, there are many valid criticisms of the EWCB chief executive, Tom Harrison, but a failure to broker a peaceful solution in Jammu and Kashmir is not one of them. At the very least, though, this is the sort of issue that deserves to be raised, not buried; discussed, not dissolved; that should be part of any conversation on the future of the sport and how its leading nations deal with each other.

Even in the Guardian they manage to skirt around the "r" word.