It’s been three months since the scandal. Right now, Steve Smith is getting ready for his comeback match. He has signed on for the Global T20 Canada and is set to play for the Toronto Nationals against the Vancouver Knights at the Maple Leaf ground in King City on Thursday.
At a rough count, this is the fifth attempt to launch a North American T20 league in the past 12 years or so. A lot of men have lost a lot of money trying to sell live cricket to the Indian diaspora. The media company behind the Global T20 has spent more than most of them. It has hired David Warner too. He’s playing for the Winnipeg Hawks.
On his way over Smith stopped in New York, his favourite city. He even proposed to his fiancee last year at the top of the Empire State Building. “Dani and I can spend four or five hours walking the streets without anyone batting an eyelid at us given cricket’s low profile in the country,” he wrote in his autobiography. It’s been a little different this time. Someone snapped a photo of him drinking a beer on his own and staring at his phone, and sold it to the Australian papers. “Disgraced Smith a sad sight in New York” was the Twitter pitch for the Herald Sun’s sorry story.
Smith has been in the Toronto’s Globe and Mail, too. Darren Sammy is leading the Toronto team and the paper’s latest headline was “Former West Indies captain welcomes disgraced Australian Smith to Canada T20 League”. Smith is the league’s star turn. The tournament director, Jason Harper, was asked whether he had considered upholding Smith’s ban. “Are you kidding me? Steve Smith is a world-class player,” Harper said. “There is no way we would turn away Steve Smith when the phones open. No way. There is no way. He is welcome.”
Now, there was another ball-tampering scandal just a few days back, in the second Test between West Indies and Sri Lanka. Dinesh Chandimal was filmed popping a sweet into his mouth then putting his saliva on the ball. Chandimal said he wasn’t guilty. He and his team refused to take the field for two hours in protest. At the hearing he said it was true he had put something in his mouth but couldn’t remember what it was. The match referee, Javagal Srinath, said the defence was “unconvincing”. Chandimal was banned for a match. Sri Lanka’s coach and manager were fined too, for bringing the game into disrepute.
Most fans know that cricketers sometimes use sugary saliva to try to make the ball swing. In his autobiography, Marcus Trescothick admitted doing something similar during the 2005 Ashes. No one had heard of a cricketer using sandpaper before, as Cameron Bancroft did in South Africa. But still, there was a stark contrast in the coverage of the two stories. The Chandimal case passed almost unreported. It barely featured in the back pages, much less the front, it didn’t make the “and finally …” on the evening news, never mind the lead. It was another reminder then, of just how extraordinary the Cape Town scandal was.
Cricket Australia has commissioned two reviews to try to find out exactly what went wrong. Neither has reported back yet, and right now, no one’s sure whether they will try to whitewash it or not. A survey that was sent around to the Australian players on the promise their answers would be anonymous was leaked to Fairfax Media just a fortnight ago. What are three things Australian cricket could do to improve the accountability of Cricket Australia? What do you believe are three significant contributors to the current culture in Australian cricket? What were the three primary causes of the events in South Africa?
It has taken so long that it has been scooped by Good Weekend magazine, which has just published a brilliant piece by Jane Cadzow under the headline What turned Steve Smith into a cheat? Cadzow sketches a very different picture of Smith to the one we painted for you in the sports pages. She sees him as a man with a case of arrested development, someone who’s been cosseted and coddled by professionalism, who has spent so much time in the bubble that he had no idea what to do when it burst. Cadzow’s Smith is the kid who dropped out of high school so he could go play club cricket in Cheshire, then dropped out of club cricket in Cheshire because he was so homesick.
Which fits with that last image of Smith, at his press conference in Sydney airport, in tears while he talked about how upset he was that he had hurt the “old man”. The two of them have been back in the nets again these last few months, just like they used to do when Smith was a boy. Playing cricket is pretty much the only thing Smith has ever known. There is a painful passage in his book, The Journey, when he explains that his agent had to persuade him to develop some interests outside of cricket. So Smith decided to invest in a couple of horses. Only, he said: “I’ve never actually had the chance to make it to the track to watch them race.”
Seems the question facing Smith isn’t how many runs he’ll score in his comeback match, or whether he will be able to recapture his best form, but how much he has grown. The man’s done a lot of living in these last three months – more, maybe, than he managed in the past 29 years.
This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
