It took a long time in the wake of the 2018 sandpaper scandal for Australia’s cricket team to persuade even its own public that a leopard could change its spots. As far as the English went, well, many were never convinced it had.
That was even before events at Lord’s last Sunday, when the controversial stumping of Jonny Bairstow during England’s second Test run-chase lit the fuse on what to that point had been a notably good-natured series, the two sets of players on annoyingly fond terms in the eyes of some grizzled ex-players.
With England 2-0 down and in must-win mode, the old narrative has resurfaced, as succinctly put by the Lord’s crowd and no doubt to be reinforced by that in Leeds today: same old Aussies, always cheating.
Whether the accusation holds any credence is almost an irrelevance, the trenches dug and the die cast, but it is worth briefly running over the cases for the defence and prosecution.
Australia still insist the dismissal of Bairstow was fair, the batter dawdling out of his crease, wrongly assuming the ball had been called dead, as wicketkeeper Alex Carey threw down the stumps. The game’s laws, in this instance, are explicitly in favour of the tourists and the umpires ruled accordingly. No one, even on the English side, has disputed that Bairstow was, technically speaking, out.
The contention then, revolves around a somewhat fabricated but still sacred conceit: the spirit of cricket. Bairstow, clearly, was not attempting to sneak a run, nor any other sort of batting advantage, this saga the result of one big, slightly dozy, misunderstanding. Ben Stokes, the England captain, says he would have handed an Australian batter a reprieve in the same circumstances on the grounds of fair play.
To Australia, the questioning of their moral fibre must sting given the lengths to which this team went to polish their image in the wake of Sandpapergate, the ball-tampering scandal in South Africa that proved a tipping point for a dressing room and on-field culture shift.
Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft, the three chief instigators (and, subsequently, scapegoats) were banned and Tim Paine and Justin Langer brought in as captain and coach to lead the clean-up operation. Both have since moved on and in Australian eyes this team, led by the far more personable Pat Cummins and visibly less gnarly on the field, is some way removed from previous, tainted incarnations.
Perception, though, is everything and to England fans — particularly the casual supporters whose focus trains on the Aussies only during home Ashes once every four years — things do not seem that different. Indeed, seven of the XI from the notorious 2018 Cape Town Test played last week at Lord’s, including both Warner, Smith and the entire bowling attack that have always insisted they had no idea they were using a tampered ball.
The irony in all of this is that “cheating” has, at various points in the Ashes story, been an English preserve. Think of Stuart Broad declining to walk, of Bodyline, the original Ashes scandal, or even of WG Grace’s run-out of Sammy Jones — eerily similar to Carey’s on Bairstow — in the very match that spawned the Ashes back in 1882.
The fire in the rivalry has been burning ever since, but this particular series heads to Leeds with controversy fanning the flames.
