Australian bowlers knew of ball tampering during 2018 Cape Town Test, hints Bancroft

Australian batsman Cameroon Bancroft said that the bowlers in the team during the infamous 2018 Cape Town Test against South Africa knew about the ball-tampering.

"Yeah, look, all I wanted to do was to be responsible and accountable for my own actions and part. Yeah, obviously what I did benefits bowlers and the awareness around that, probably, is self-explanatory," Bancroft told The Guardian on Friday.

"Uh… yeah, look, I think, yeah, I think it's pretty probably self-explanatory," he added, without naming any of his teammates.

Bancroft, who was caught on camera hiding a piece of sandpaper in his underpants during the match, was banned from cricket for six months while the then captain Steven Smith and his deputy David Warner were slapped with one-year bans.

Cricket Australia’s former chief executive Kevin Roberts in 2019 said that the CA’s integrity unit had set up an anonymous hotline for players and staff to gather more evidence of wrong doing but did not find any. He also said that the Board had to take a swift decision on the playing XI for the next Test in Johannesburg.

“Certainly the investigation needed to be conducted swiftly, we needed to fulfil our commitment to field a team against South Africa the following week, and we didn't know whether we'd need to fly 11 new players in to fill that team or no new players. The ultimate answer was somewhere in between. So the investigation was absolutely fit for purpose, but we haven't rested on those laurels. We've made repeated and extensive invitations to anyone to report any integrity matters or concerns about ball-tampering ever since,” Roberts said.

Bancroft, who is currently playing country cricket for Durham, said that he was lost at that time and has learned a tough lesson after suffering the consequences of his actions.

“I invested too much to the point where I lost control of my values. What had become important to me was being liked, being well valued, feeling really important to my teammates, like I was contributing something by using sandpaper on a cricket ball. That’s something I don’t think I even understood until that mistake happened. But it’s part of the journey and a hard lesson I needed to learn.”