Saw a player having a crack: Tim Paine claims South Africa were ball-tampering after Newlands Test in 2018

Australia’s tour of South Africa in early 2018 made heads turn in the cricketing fraternity. After the series was tied at 1-1 and the third and penultimate Test was underway, Cameron Bancroft, David Warner and then Aussie skipper Steve Smith were involved in a huge controversy when the former was caught hiding a sandpaper in his pocket during the third day’s play. 

After an investigation, it was revealed that Smith and Warner were aware of Bancroft hiding a sandpaper while fielding. As a result, the trio were banned by Cricket Australia (CA) and the captaincy baton was passed onto Tim Paine. Paine, in his autobiography  ‘Tim Paine: The Price Paid’, has now made a massive claim that the Faf du Plessis-led were also ball-tampering in the fourth and final Test, in Johannesburg.

“I saw it happen in the fourth Test of that series. Think about that. After everything that had happened in Cape Town, after all the headlines and bans and carry on,” Paine wrote in the book as quoted by ESPNcricnifo. “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,” the keeper-batter added.

The Sandpaper Gate is a dark phase in Australian cricket. Recently, then SA skipper Faf du Plessis, in his upcoming book, also stated that his team had spotted Australian team fiddling with the ball in the run-up to the Cape Town Test after he observed the ‘insane reverse swing’ Mitchell Starc was getting from the red cherry in the initial matches.

Eventually, SA thrashed Australia 3-1 to win the series but the four Tests are still vividly remembered for the ball-tampering saga.