Former Australia captain Tim Paine has come out with a sensational allegation on the South African cricket team saying that they also tempered with the ball following the 2018 Newlands Test which was marred with the ‘Sandpaper-gate’ scandal. Paine who stepped down from captaincy a year ago made these comments in his newly launched autobiography, The Price Paid on Tuesday.
The Australian trio of David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft were suspended by Cricket Australia after Bancroft was found with sandpaper on the field during a Test match against South Africa in Cape Town. Pain however has claimed that South Africa did the same in the following test.
“Think about that. After everything that had happened in Cape Town, after all the headlines and bans and carry on,” he wrote. “I was standing at the bowlers’ end in the next test when a shot came up on the screen of a South African player at mid-off having a huge crack at the ball.”
But the footage got lost- Tim Paine
Paine revealed that he went straight to the TV director following the incident but found that the footage was missing. He also saw the director pulling the shot off the stadium screen immediately after it happened. Both, Cricket Australia and South Africa declined to comment on the allegations levied by Tim Paine.
“We went to the umpires about it, which might seem a bit poor, but we’d been slaughtered and were convinced they’d been up to it since the first Test,” he wrote. “But the footage got lost. As it would.” Talking about the sandpaper incident, Paine said that the team should have taken responsibility as a whole rather than individual players.
“Everyone was a part of it to some degree – would it have worked out better for those three players if we had owned it as a team? I think it would have,” he said. Though Paine was cleared by the investigation over a 2018 ‘sexting’ scandal, he felt that Cricket Australia did not offer him enough support.
“I felt they were driven by the need to protect their image … They were hanging me out to dry,” said Tim Paine.
