Tim Paine has accused South Africa of ball tampering in the Test match immediately after Australian cricket was rocked by the sandpaper-gate scandal
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He has claimed that the act was covered up by match broadcasters.
Paine made the explosive claims in his autobiography The Paid Price, with the former Test captain becoming the first player lift the lid on the 2018 Cape Town Test in a tell-all book.
Paine, who was forced to step down in 2021 in the wake of a sexting incident with a former Cricket Tasmania colleague that happened in 2017, denied that the plan for Cameron Bancroft to use sandpaper on the ball during the third Test of the series against South Africa at Cape Town was hatched at a team meeting.
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He says he was stunned and his heart sank as replays showed Bancroft hiding the sandpaper in his pants before being spoken to by umpires. “I was thinking ‘what the f**k’,” Paine wrote. “A sense of dread came over us all.”
In a lengthy chapter on the 2018 tour, Paine went to great lengths to point out that ball tampering was commonplace in cricket and that it was the sport’s dirty little secret. Faf du Plessis, who was South Africa captain at the time, makes similar claims in his upcoming book.
But Paine conceded using sandpaper was “next level” and “shameful”, with traditional tampering usually via means such as throwing the ball into the ground.
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Regardless, he says he was left furious when he spotted South Africa allegedly pulling apart the seam of the ball in the following Test.
“I saw it happen in the fourth Test of that series,” Paine wrote. “Think about that. After everything that had happened in Cape Town, after all the headlines and bans and carry on.
“I was standing at the bowlers’ end in the next Test when a shot came up on the screen of a South African player at mid-off having a huge crack at the ball.
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“The television director, who had played an active role in catching out Cam, immediately pulled the shot off the screen. We went to the umpires about it, which might seem a bit poor, but we’d been slaughtered and were convinced they’d been up to it since the first Test. But the footage got lost. As it would.”
