We need to talk about ball-tampering: Cricket itself is to blame for Australia’s bleakly hilarious scandal

Let’s get this straight right from the outset: the Australian ball-tampering scandal is, at its very heart, extremely funny. It’s funny in many and unexpected ways. The dawning, slow-motion dread on the faces of Australia’s Three Stooges as their misdemeanour is replayed on the big screen. Cameron Bancroft hiding the fateful sandpaper down his trousers, in the hope that it will somehow save him from indignity. England being bowled out for 58 and somehow not being the most ridiculous Test side of the week. The sight of the once-heroic Steve Smith being smuggled out of South Africa like a teary-eyed backpacker whose only crime was to help a guy called Julio carry a bag through customs.

And yet something extremely funny can simultaneously be extremely serious. The inconsolable Smith and the incorrigible David Warner have been banned for a year, Bancroft for nine months, which is fine by me. Personally, I’d have argued for two years, perhaps four. I wouldn’t have gone as far as life bans, but I wouldn’t have protested too strongly either. Let me explain why.

Amid the yards of newsprint and millions of words that have already been expended on this, the wave of initial revulsion (how dare they!) and the subsequent counter-wave of arch derision (lol, look at all these people getting angry!), there seems to be an entire aspect to l’affaire sandpaper that has only been lightly addressed. I’m really sorry about this. But we need to talk about ball-tampering.

It always strikes me as rather curious when people attempt to contextualise the current scandal by saying that ball-tampering has been going on for years. Old pros – former England players, even some former England captains – have dutifully lined up to ridicule the overreaction, downplay the crime itself, chunter knowingly about how rife it was in their day: bottle-tops, sneakily-picked seams, Ambre Solaire and the like. You might, with a modicum of perspective, speculate that the fact cricket has tolerated this sort of premeditated cheating for so long should be a source of deep shame. Instead, weirdly, it is being offered as mitigation.

I think I know why this is happening. Over the last decade or so, as cricket has slowly receded from the national consciousness, it has undergone a process that affects all medium-sized sports in the internet age: contracting and atomising into its own self-contained universe. A rich and passionate subculture with its own argot, its own moral code, and a healthy disdain for outside interference. You either get it or you don’t. And like any quasi-autonomous community, it devised wedge issues to separate the ones who did from the ones who didn’t. Mankading was one. The 10-team World Cup another. Now ball-tampering, and the emotional reaction to it, has become a sort of bellwether, a shibboleth, a way of showing you’re on the inside.

In an outstanding feature for Cricinfo last year, Vithushan Ehantharajah uncovered how English cricket has come to embrace and harness reverse swing over the last generation, using intricate methods that often verge on the immoral. Roughing up the ball on trouser zips is commonplace. So too using uncut nails to lift the quarter-seam. This is as applicable on the village green as it is in the elite game. Talk to county players on the quiet and they will tacitly admit that this sort of stuff, while dubious, is basically accepted. The most common objection you will hear to Australia’s use of sandpaper is not the cheating itself, but how abominably inept they were at it.

And so over the years, as players and coaches and umpires and administrators have turned a blind eye, a deeply unsatisfactory circular logic has emerged. Everyone does it, so it’s fine. And it’s fine, so everyone does it. Throw in the three corroborative facts – reverse swing is entertaining to watch, even a tampered ball requires a large degree of skill to use properly, and ball manipulation is a necessary corrective to a game increasingly weighted in favour of batsmen – and you have essentially enacted a cheat’s charter by stealth. This is how we have reached a point where the International Cricket Council can extract 75 per cent of Bancroft’s match fee for roughing up the ball, whilst fining Faf du Plessis 50 per cent of his for wearing unsanctioned shoelaces, as they did in 2013.

Enough. There comes a point where precedent will only get you so far. There comes a point where a sport can no longer be its own moral arbiter. And by the way, Australia’s past behaviour – the rancour and the sledging and moral preening that already seems to belong to another, more innocent age – is of little relevance here. Had it been Bangladesh or New Zealand or the West Indies doing this, it might not have been as big a story, and certainly not one as deliciously ironic or bleakly hilarious. But it would have been no less scandalous. The fact that ball-tampering receives a pitifully weak sanction doesn’t make it OK. It means the sanction is pitifully weak, and cricket has been too complacent for too long about a venality that has run through the game’s bloodstream for decades, if not centuries.

In case there should be any doubt about this: to tamper with the ball is essentially to tamper with the central part of the game. It is an attempt to skew the balance between bat and ball via premeditated, underhand means. Imagine, if you could somehow avoid detection, trimming the stumps to make them an inch shorter. It may not be as mortally objectionable as match-fixing, which is an assault on the result itself rather than the means of reaching it. But it seeks to achieve roughly the same effect as doping – essentially, subverting the fundamentals of the sport in order to gain a surreptitious edge. And with the recognition that there are innumerable shades of grey to take into account (polishing the ball with sweet-enriched saliva, deliberately returning the ball on the bounce), the penalties should be in a similar ballpark.

What happens now is anyone’s guess. For starters, cricket’s open relationship with legislation, its well-meaning but ultimately useless Spirit of Cricket, needs to be tightened. Should the ball be kept primarily in the umpire’s possession, and only given to the fielding side at the start of each over, or even each delivery? Do we need to start looking in players’ mouths to check for sweets? Or alternatively, do we need to codify the whole racket and set down exactly what teams should be allowed to use? Whatever your stance, these are the sort of conversations the sport needs to be having as a matter of urgency.

Clearly, some of you will disagree strongly with all this. Storm in a teacup, spare us the moral outrage, and all that. Trouble is, those are exactly the sort of things people were saying in the late 1990s about road cycling. Only the exposure of the industrial-scale doping operations at Festina and Lance Armstrong’s US Postal team forced cycling to confront its own warped morality, its troubling omerta, the way in which endemic cheating can essentially become part of the odorous fabric of a sport.

This is the sort of crossroads at which cricket now stands. Rarely has the disconnect between how it sees itself and how others see it been more starkly exposed. And yet if it makes the right choices now, perhaps this whole sordid affair will ultimately have been for the best. Perhaps we will look back at this as the point at which cricket, confronted with its own tarnished reflection, finally opened the curtains and let a little light in.