"Bancroft is just doing it to get something off his chest"

Cameron Bancroft recently dropped a bomb saying that the Australian bowlers were aware of the ball-tampering tactics in Cape Town in 2018. The Australian bowling coach at the time, David Saker has now responded to it by saying there were quite a few things that went wrong in South Africa and this scandal is something that's going to hover around in Australia for years to come. 

"Obviously a lot of things went wrong at that time. The finger-pointing is going to go on and on and on,” Saker told The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. 

"There was a lot of people to blame. It could have been me to blame, it could have been someone else. It could have been stopped and it wasn’t, which is unfortunate," he added. 

"Cameron’s a very nice guy. He’s just doing it to get something off his chest ... He’s not going to be the last. You could point your finger at me, you could point your finger at Boof (then coach Darren Lehmann), could you point it at other people, of course you could. The disappointing thing is it’s never going to go away. Regardless of what’s said. We all know that we made a monumental mistake. The gravity wasn’t as plain until it all came out."

Saker left his post in early 2019 and has since worked as Sri Lanka's fast bowling coach, before resigning in February 2021. In an interview with The Guardian, Bancroft said: "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."

Following the revelations, Cricket Australia later said that they are open to reinvestigating the whole episode. "CA has maintained all along that if anyone is in possession of new information in regards to the Cape Town Test of 2018, they should come forward and present it. The investigation conducted at the time was detailed and comprehensive. Since then, no one has presented new information to CA that casts doubt on the investigation's findings," a CA spokesperson told ESPNCricinfo.