Former South Africa captain Faf du Plessis has made some damning revelations in his autobiography – Faf: Through Fire. And he has thrown some light on the events leading up to the 2018 ball-tampering scandal that resulted in a worldwide furore.
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Australia’s four-Test tour of South Africa in 2018 produced several memorable individual performances and close contests but is now best remembered for the ball-tampering scandal or as it is also known ‘The Sandpaper Gate’. The Aussies were accused of tampering with the ball using a sandpaper that allowed their fast bowlers to generate reverse swing.
Cameron Bancroft was filmed stuffing a sandpaper piece in his trousers that led to the revelation. Aside from Bancroft, the then Australia captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner were handed lengthy bans from all forms of cricket.
“During the first Test in Durban, the Australian pace attack had got the ball to reverse insanely,” Du Plessis writes in his book.
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“Mitchell Starc claimed nine wickets and, although I regard him as one of the best proponents of reverse-swing bowling I have ever seen or faced, those deliveries in Durban were borderline unplayable. He would come in around the wicket with a badly deteriorated ball and get it to hoop past us.
“Our balls had also reversed but not nearly as much as theirs. We suspected that someone had been nurturing the ball too much to get it to reverse so wildly, and we watched the second Test at St George’s through binoculars, so that we could follow the ball more closely while Australia was fielding.
“When we noticed that the ball was going to David Warner quite often – our changing room must have looked like a birdwatching hide as we peered intently through our binoculars. There was a visible difference between how Mitchell Starc got the ball to reverse in the first Test in Durban and the final Test in Johannesburg,” he wrote.
In an interview with the BBC, Du Plessis also claimed how Australia’s tactics also involved bullying their opponents.
“Australia wanted to bully us. We had to stand up for ourselves. They abused us that whole game but the way we fought back turned the series around,” he said.
He also labelled Warner as a ‘bully’.
“He was a bully,” Du Plessis says. “I don’t have time for bullies,” Du Plessis said.
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