Just when our excellent bowling attack was luring me back into cricket comes the great debacle:
The International Cricket Council has suspended Steve Smith for a Test match over the ball-tampering furore in South Africa, ensuring that Tim Paine will continue to lead the disgraced team for the final leg of the series in Johannesburg.
The crisis confronting the Australian team yesterday forced Smith and David Warner to sensationally stand down from the captaincy and vice-captaincy for the rest of the third Test as Paine took over.
Hours later, the ICC announced that it had found Smith guilty of being “party to a decision to attempt to change the condition of the ball in order to gain an unfair advantage”. He was also fined 100 per cent of his match fee. Cameron Bancroft, who used yellow tape to tamper with the ball on Saturday after a plot devised at the lunch break, was spared a ban.
Stupid and vain. With the best bowling attack on earth, why tamper with the ball? Add a half-inch to our bats given we can’t make runs.
Still, it’s the perfect metaphor for a nation whose only competitive edge is dubious ethics:
- we cheat our kids of houses by allowing the market to become a global money-laundering centre;
- we cheat labour of wages by lying about the impacts of mass immigration;
- unions cheat by looking after members not labour;
- we cheat in our national Budget via a ceaseless scab grab;
- our banks cheat everyone in sight;
- corporations cheat everyone in sight with PR campaigns to kill policy;
- the energy cartel cheats us of gas and cheap power;
- decarbonisation is cheated via policy lies;
- mining corporations cheat us of prime ministers;
- the RBA is a global cheat and uses the courts to cheat the truth;
- Treasury is a perpetual forecasting cheat;
- state and federal parliaments cheat by taking foreign bribes;
- our media is a giant real estate-pumping cheat.
Australia has slid eight places to 13th in the Transparency International Corruption Index in six years and there’s more ahead.
Cheating is what we do best so why would be expect more from our cricketers?
