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New Delhi, India
Former Australia Test captain Tim Paine has made some shocking claims on the infamous ball-tampering scandal that rocked Australian cricket in 2018. Paine was Australia's wicket-keeper in the game when Cameron Bancroft was caught live tampering with the ball using sandpaper against South Africa in the Cape Town Test.
Bancroft's footage soon went viral on social media and became a major talking point in the cricket fraternity as Cricket Australia sprung into action. The Australian cricket board handed a nine-month ban to Bancroft and suspended the then captain Steve Smith and David Warner for one year each.
Cricket Australia also put a permanent leadership ban on Warner, who was the vice-captain of the team. Paine had taken over as captain of Australia's Test team following the bans on Smith and Warner and successfully managed to bail the team out of trouble in the months that followed.
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Opening up about the infamous scandal that shattered the reputation of Australian cricket, Paine said everyone in the team was part of it to some extent. The former Australia Test skipper also felt things could have been different had they taken the blame as a team.
"I still feel like Steve, Dave and Cam copped the brunt of it, and Boof (coach, Darren Lehmann) too, but I have wondered if there was a point where we could have said something or done something differently," Paine wrote in his autobiography 'The Price Paid'.
"Everyone was a part of it to some degree â would it have worked out better for those three players if we had owned it as a team? I think it would have," he added.
Recalling the incident, Paine said he was shocked after Bancroft was caught on the camera using sandpaper on the ball and that the Australian team made some bad choices that tarnished their reputation.
"I was thinking, âWhat the f***?â A sense of dread came over us all. There were bad choices made that day and it is an event which has tarnished all our reputations, but there certainly wasnât any team meeting, saying, âThis is what weâre going to do.â The team just knew that if we were going to get it to reverse we had to be on our toes about throwing it in on the bounce and stopping that once it started to go," [Pain wrote in his book.