A bunch of Cameron Bancroft articles have materialised today because he’s arrived in England after his dinner engagement, ready to lead Durham for a large percentage of the season.

As you all know, we greatly enjoy Bancroft’s self-important public pronouncements and this latest press conference features all the kinds of thing you’ve come to expect.

He talks about being able “to detach myself from this story of being a professional cricketer,” and at one point he says, “me being authentic to others is something that I’m really passionate about.”

But that’s not the best bit. One article quotes Durham’s new captain as referring to his new club as, “The Durham County Cricket Club.”

Many, many years ago, a friend utterly bizarrely advised us to watch an episode of Big Brother on the spurious grounds that one of the contestants said her husband once appeared on “the Ant and Dec.”

This delightfully unexpected definite article has always stayed with us and it pleases us greatly that Cameron Bancroft seems to suffer a similar affliction.

But did he really say it?

We couldn’t live without knowing, so we went and watched the press conference on YouTube.

We can now reveal that the answer to the question ‘Did Cameron Bancroft really say “The Durham County Cricket Club”?’ very much depends on who you ask.

If you ask us, then yes, he definitely said it.

But if you ask YouTube’s auto-subtitles feature, it reckons he said something very different.

Back when we had a grim office job at a company that was dying on its arse, no-one wanted to manage our department because it meant a lot more spreadsheets and getting shouted at and not very much more money.

(Culture-wise, the founder once described it as a “sales-led company,” which basically meant that he wanted everyone to be Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. (This is not at all a viable business approach, by the way. The more Blakes you have, the less efficient a firm becomes. From experience, we’d estimate that the maximum number of Blakes a thriving company can accommodate would be either one or none. Probably none.))

One time, when they needed to recruit for the manager role for about the ninth time, they took each remaining member of the team into a side room one by one. To each of us, they said, “We really think that you, specifically, would be perfect for this job,” and each of us said “No, thank you.”

We get the impression there’s been a bit of this at Durham where Cameron “Role Model” Bancroft – a man who almost gave up cricket to teach yoga but then didn’t – has been named captain for the 2019 season.

After everyone else had rejected the job, it seems like there was, at most, one other candidate other than Bancroft: Chris Rushworth.

Now Chris Rushworth is a fine individual and a guaranteed member of the first team, but he made one fatal error in his bid to become captain: he practised bowling and became good at bowling.

Just as there is a hierarchy of suitability for the position of England captain, so there is a similar list for counties.

As Mark Wood told Cricinfo: “We have a young team so there were only two other players I thought could have done it.

“One would have been Alex Lees, but at this time in his career it’s probably better that he focuses on himself and goes under the radar a little bit.

“The other one would be Chris Rushworth, but we all know bowlers never become captains because they think that we’re dumb.”

The story of international cricket in 2018 is really just all the stuff that happened with Australia. This seems a bit narrow and exclusive for an end-of-year retrospective, so we thought we’d instead focus on all the funny things that happened in 2018 to try and broaden it out a bit. Having taken this approach and then edited it all down a bit to make it more concise, we were left with… all the stuff that happened with Australia this year.

To try and inject a note of tension into proceedings, let’s try and work out which character involved in this saga was the funniest.

2018 began, like so many of its predecessors, in January

Remember the Ashes? We pretty much don’t, which is a measure of (a) how much has happened since then and (b) our memory.

Australia began their year by beating England by an innings and 123 runs in the fifth and mercifully final Test. (We did a series review from an England perspective, which is quite interesting to read almost a year later with the benefit of hindsight.)

After the Ashes, the two sides parted ways. England went to New Zealand and Australia went to South Africa. At this point they both engaged in a rather more ferociously contested battle with each other to attract the least desirable headline. England honestly must have though they’d emerge victorious when they were bowled out for 58, but Australia had something metaphorically up their sleeve and literally in Cameron Bancroft’s pocket.

The series in South Africa deserves a bit more attention than that though because there was plenty that preceded the (spoiler alert) sandpapering of a cricket ball like a massive bunch of cheats.

The preamble

Australia gave early notice that they planned to attain new levels of abject twattiness when David Warner and Nathan Lyon ran out AB de Villiers.

This was such an obscenely perfect example of how massively cockish that Australian side had become that we can’t believe it isn’t mentioned in every single po-faced ‘analysis’ piece that looks back on what happened.

Just look at David Warner’s ‘celebration’ face and tell us this isn’t a very unpopular cricket team in facial expression form.

A short account of the run-out goes like this: Warner threw the ball to Lyon, de Villiers dived to make his ground, and Lyon ran him out. Lyon then tossed the ball near de Villiers as he ran off to celebrate and sort of laughed at him while he lay face-down in the dirt. Warner celebrated by turning into Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, hurling pure visceral fury in the direction of Aiden Markram (who wasn’t even out).

Here’s a longer account.

It was very very funny because there was no way of watching it without thinking that Warner was a complete bell-end and it’s rare for anyone to attain quite that level of unarguable pantomime villainy.

Later in the series, there was an even funnier incident involving Warner – funnier because that previous incident fed into it. The short version of this one is that Warner pissed Kagiso Rabada off royally by hitting him for successive fours and then a six and then a ball later his stump was sent cartwheeling towards the sightscreen.

Here’s a longer version of what happened and it’s worth a read because as well as being hilarious, this was also the finest cricket moment of the year; a moment so unutterably perfect that it’s hard to imagine how it could ever be improved upon. We’ve got a warm glow just thinking about it.

The actual ball-tampering bit

Australia planned to tamper with the ball, tampered with the ball, attempted to cover-up tampering with the ball and then, once they were flat out of options, admitted tampering with the ball and claimed it would never happen again and hoped it would all go away. (It didn’t. People are still writing surprisingly long articles about it in December.)

The incident itself was funny for all sorts of reasons. The rank incompetence would get many people’s votes. The cover-up when Cameron Bancroft slipped actual sandpaper down his actual pants was a highlight too. But the funniest element – surely surely surely – was that the team had spent the preceding years roaming the world like sporting morality consultants, delivering unsolicited lectures to anyone and everyone on what is and isn’t acceptable on a cricket field.

The aftermath

Immediately after they’d been caught, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft tried to explain what had happened and in so doing told some absolutely inexplicable lies. Bancroft put forward as a mitigating factor that he didn’t actually use sandpaper but something akin to home-made sandpaper that he’d created using tape and dirt.

1. Who cares, Cameron? What’s the difference?
2. Oh no, turns out it was sandpaper after all

Then things got even funnier. Or at least the headlines did. Fox Sports suggested that amid all the recriminations David Warner had ‘gone rogue’.

Going rogue mostly involved (a) sitting on his own at one point and (b) drinking Champagne with some friends who weren’t cricketers.

At this point it’s hard to see how anyone could top Warner to be named Australia’s Funniest Cricket Character 2018, but there is one more contender, so please bear with us.

In the next Test, Australia got bowled out for 119 when they were chasing 612 in the final Test. What a tour! We tried to work out exactly how bad it was here.

The after-aftermath

It was widely agreed that Steve Smith, David Warner, Cameron Bancroft and Darren Lehmann shouldn’t be Australia cricket people for a little while and then a bunch of administrators were asked to find something else to do too.

It’s easy to replace international cricketers. First-class cricket is basically a very protracted job interview, so you’re always fairly well informed who should take over from the guy you’ve just suspended. Coaches are sort of similar, but cricket boards tend to make them have an actual interview as well.

After doing a bit of that, Australia appointed Justin Langer and the very first thing Justin Langer did was talk absolute world class bollocks.

Deploying the term ‘elite mateship’ was definitely the funniest bit, but to be honest the whole first interview was an absolute tour de force.

This was very much a sign of where Australia planned to go post-sandpapering and Langer swiftly proved himself very much the man to lead the way. New captain Tim Paine also stepped in when necessary, even though he otherwise seems to be a broadly sensible person.

The root of Australia’s moral malaise had been a complete inability to comprehend that there was no universally agreed upon ‘line’ separating acceptable behaviour from unacceptable behaviour.

After an unusually protracted bout of navel-gazing during which this fact should have become abundantly clear, Langer emerged to inform us that the line is what separates “banter” from “abuse”.

If this sounded not in the least bit clearly-defined to anyone outside Australia, Paine added: “We know what’s right and what’s wrong, so it’s pretty simple.”

Then, almost as if to emphasise that it really really wasn’t pretty simple at all actually, Michael Clarke weighed in with some vintage Clarkian nonsense and poor Justin Langer got all confused. (Honestly, with their unwavering belief that everyone sees and accepts exactly the same lines that they do, you can’t help but conclude that Australian cricketers probably think they could draw the India-Pakistan border right through the middle of Kashmir and everyone would be totally fine with that.)

Langer also tried to explain what in heaven ‘elite honesty‘ meant, as a consequence of which we discovered that he’d once used the phrase ‘elite humility‘ – a term so magnificently wrong-headed and contradictory, we wouldn’t have believed it was a real quote if all of the above hadn’t already made it immediately apparent that of course it was.

So in its year of comedy, who was Australian cricket’s most valuable player?

Michael Clarke’s appearance was really little more than a strong cameo, while Steve Smith’s performances largely hinge on the idea that he was Australia’s captain in the first place.

That leaves us with three main contenders.

Cameron Bancroft (a) put sandpaper down his pants and (b) told a really weird and pointless lie about whether or not it was actual sandpaper.

David Warner (a) carried on like a right one, (b) got hilariously bowled by Kagiso Rabada and (c) ‘went rogue’.

Justin Langer (a) said ‘elite mateship’, (b) said ‘elite honesty’, (c) said ‘elite humility’ and (d) just absolutely did not remotely understand that there isn’t a line.

Verdict: We’re going to give it to Langer.

Bancroft’s work was very obvious and in all honesty a bit Route One. Warner performed well, taking the trouble to build himself up sufficiently that it was all the funnier when he was knocked down, but it was still very much a surface comedy.

In contrast, Langer’s pronouncements are both immediately ridiculous but also carry a lot of slow-burn promise for the future. While it’s already a bit tiresome to see people making fun of him by using the word ‘elite’ all the time, the fact that this in no way dissuades Langer from using it is very high grade comedy in itself.

To that, we can add a looming spectre of a joke that we for one simply cannot wait for. At some point in the not-too-distant future, an Australian cricketer is going to do something that most people will agree is unacceptable. Langer is then going to refer to his own unique definition of ‘the line’, assume that everyone else shares exactly the same view, and then he’s going to tell us why the Australian cricketer didn’t cross the line and why we’re all wrong to think that he did.

To an elite 2019!

Today is a very important day. Today is the day that Cameron Bancroft revealed that he almost gave up cricket to teach yoga but then didn’t.

It’s also the day of the Festivus King Cricket post where we all come together for the airing of grievances and we mention that we’ll be downing tools for a few days before telling you about the Boxing Day Test matches that you already knew about.

But first, the Bancroft thing.

In a not-at-all weird development, the banned opener’s written an open letter to himself.

To give you some sense of the tone, this is what he tells himself about sandpapering a cricket ball.

“You will wonder why you did it, question every part of who you are as a person, grieve, grow, act and become someone again. I promise.

“Somebody who you can stare back at in the mirror and feel love for, be content with, be proud of and grateful for.”

Say what you like about Australians, they really can make a hell of a song and dance out of the ineffective alteration of the surface of a cricket ball.

At one point Bancroft makes a reference to “the journey of forgiveness of the self”. A little later, he quotes Saint Francis of Assisi.

About three-quarters of the way through (the letter was written onboard flight QF772 to Melbourne and we can only presume it was an extremely long flight) he says: “Maybe cricket isn’t for you, you’ll ask yourself. Will you return? Yoga will be such a fulfilling experience.”

Obviously this is the exciting bit. What’s his reasoning for (probably) coming back to cricket?

“It is simply just fun.”

Fair play – that’s a decent answer.

This year’s Boxing Day Tests are:

• Australia v India at the MCG
• South Africa v Pakistan at Centurion
• New Zealand v Sri Lanka at Christchurch

Happy Festivus. We’ll be back in a few days with a great big review of Australia’s comedy year. Don’t expect much Boxing Day Test coverage because we almost certainly can’t be arsed.

3 minute read

When we first saw Cameron Bancroft tampering with the ball using sandpaper, we thought to ourself: “That is sandpaper” – and so did everyone else.

We were therefore very much surprised when he later claimed that it was not in fact sandpaper but something akin to home-made sandpaper.

“We had a discussion during the break and I saw an opportunity to use some tape, get some granules from rough patches on the wicket to change the ball condition,” he explained.

It has since turned out that no, actually it was sandpaper all along because of course it was.

This revelation both made sense and also entirely didn’t make sense.

It made sense because the main thing sticky tape sticks to is itself, so it would have been a hell of a feat for Bancroft to keep it in his pocket all flat and rigid like that.

It didn’t make sense because why did Bancroft say that it wasn’t sandpaper? It was such a pointless distinction it literally didn’t even occur to us that it might not be true.

Bancroft and Steve Smith were in that press conference admitting what they’d done. Yet at the same time as coming clean, they also decided that they would tell an outright lie about that one specific detail. How did they hit upon that particular course of action?

Smith: We’ve been caught in what was clearly a premeditated attempt to alter the condition of the ball using sandpaper. What the hell are we going to do? What shall we say?

Bancroft: Let’s mostly confess but then say that we didn’t use sandpaper. Let’s say it was tape that we sort of made into sandpaper once we were out there on the field of play.

Smith: Yes, that’s an excellent idea. That should entirely negate everything we’ve done and ensure we sidestep any and all criticism.

Seriously, why would you lie about it? The question demands some scrutiny.

In that initial press conference…

1. Smith and Bancroft admitted ball-tampering. The nature of the material used to carry out the ball-tampering did not negate this, so this cannot be the reason why they decided to lie.

2. Smith and Bancroft admitted planning to tamper with the ball. They said they’d come up with the idea in the break. They weren’t claiming this was a spur of the moment thing, so this cannot be the reason why they decided to lie.

3. Smith and Bancroft admitted using something very much akin to sandpaper to tamper with the ball. The primary aim of rubbing the hypothetical sticky tape in dirt was to create a thing with a coarse side which could then be used to rough the surface of the ball – so basically sandpaper. The nature of the thing cannot be the reason why they decided to lie.

4. Smith and Bancroft did not admit to sourcing actual sandpaper. This is the only difference between what happened and what they said happened. It would seem that for Smith and Bancroft the threshold for wrongdoing lies at the very specific point between ‘making sandpaper’ and ‘purchasing or otherwise acquiring sandpaper’.

Conclusion

This no doubt sounds very much ridiculous to you, but it’s the nature of ‘ball maintenance’ that everyone has a slightly different but very precise idea about what is okay and what is not okay.

For example, a lot of people feel that sucking a sweet and then taking the resultant sugary spit from your tongue to shine the ball is okay, but that taking sugary spit directly from a sweet on your tongue and using that to shine the ball is not okay. For these people there is a critical ratio of sugar-to-saliva beyond which you become a massive great cheat.

You will probably have your own opinion about where exactly the threshold lies. That opinion will no doubt be mental.

Darren Lehmann has another opinion again. We don’t know what that opinion is, but it is so radically different from Smith and Bancroft’s that the poor man has had to resign from his job as Australia coach due to the extraordinary weight of disappointment he is currently feeling.

4 minute read

Well this is very much hilarious but also reprehensible because saying the second bit is part of the unwritten contract we have all entered into as cricket fans.

Australia have been caught ball-tampering, a simple statement that doesn’t really do justice to all that’s happened and how people have reacted to it.

Australia planned to tamper with the ball, tampered with the ball, attempted to cover-up tampering with the ball and then, once they were flat out of options, admitted tampering with the ball and claimed it would never happen again (good luck taking 20 wickets in your next home Test match, lads).

It’s all a bit sordid. Let’s try and work out which was the worst bit (and also which was the funniest).

Altering the condition of the ball

The kind of cheating where you subsequently have to be incredibly skilful for it to actually have an impact is not, in our eyes, the world’s greatest crime.

The written law is that cricketers can only polish the ball. The unwritten law is pretty much: “Just don’t get caught, okay, because then we all have to feign outrage.”

Different people are happy with different things when it comes to ball “maintenance”. There will never be agreement, so the unwritten law becomes the pragmatic solution. Vithushan Ehantharajah wrote a truly excellent piece about reverse swing for The Cricket Monthly that features many of the common techniques. (In the lower leagues, a team-mate of Special Correspondent Dad’s used to apply lip balm to his trousers so that shining resulted in a sort of veneer.)

Surreptitiously altering the condition of the ball is like the ‘sticky bottle’ or ‘magic spanner’ in cycling, where a rider gets assistance from a team car under the guise of doing something else. There are circumstances where these things are considered okay and circumstances where they’re considered not okay. You do them at your own risk and if you cross the line, you just have to accept that everyone’s going to rip into you.

Verdict: Not the worst bit.

The rank incompetence

We don’t know whether it’s the worst aspect of this incident, but the Australians’ ball-tampering incompetence is certainly the funniest aspect. We’ll say that now. No real need to compare it the others.

Let’s first deal with the methodology. This is what Cameron Bancroft used on the ball.

Looks like sandpaper, doesn’t it? Looks pretty much exactly like sandpaper. That’s certainly what everyone instantly assumed.

But, no, it was not sandpaper. According to Bancroft: “We had a discussion during the break and I saw an opportunity to use some tape, get some granules from rough patches on the wicket to change the ball condition.”

Cameron Bancroft did not bring sandpaper onto the field of play to use on the ball. What he did was infinitely stupider than that. What Cameron Bancroft did was bring some raw materials onto the field of play with which to manufacture some sandpaper and THEN he used it on the ball.

Compounding this, he added: “Obviously it didn’t work, the umpires didn’t see it change the way the ball was behaving or how it looked or anything like that.”

So to run through the whole thing: Australia went to incredibly great lengths to try and alter the condition of the ball by manufacturing homemade sandpaper in full view of about 100 cameras and then they used it in full view of about 100 cameras and it didn’t work.

As risk-reward goes, that is not a great ratio.

Verdict: Not the worst bit.

The cover-up

Footage of an incident of cheating has been played on the big screen at the ground and obviously also broadcast around the world. Darren Lehmann thinks he’s probably the only one who’s spotted it though so he gets a message to the player responsible and lets him know.

Bancroft sneaks the offending material into his pants.

Now no-one will ever know!

‘Yes, yes, it was definitely this completely different bit of material that I was using,’ he told the umpires.

After he later came clean, Steve Smith said the plan was hatched by “the leadership group” but also informed the press that he was “not naming names.”

Verdict: Pretty bad.

The hypocrisy

Australia have in recent years very much positioned themselves as the moral arbiters of the game. As a rule of thumb, everything they do is fine and anything anyone else does crosses the line.

Darren Lehmann, in particular, has been roaming the world like some sort of sporting morality consultant, delivering lectures on what is and isn’t acceptable in cricket. More than that, in fact – like a judge, handing out verdicts and recommending sentences.

The whole time he’s been doing this, he – and everyone else in the team – has been going on and on and on about how the team plays hard but fair. There are so many quotes making reference to ‘the line’ and Australia’s respect for it that we honestly can’t pick out a favourite.

Verdict: This is probably the worst bit. It’s like the Team Sky thing, if you’ve been following that story (here’s a breakdown of it if you haven’t). If you set yourselves up as whiter-than-white, as moral arbiters of the sport, you will be judged against that standard.

2 minute read

You can fight hard for a couple of innings, but when all seems lost it can become really hard to summon the enthusiasm and make any real effort. You can’t judge people too harshly on what happens in these circumstances.

You might consider that a comment on England’s later efforts in this match, but it’s actually our way of saying that after several nights of trying to watch live coverage, we didn’t bother denying ourself any sleep for day five.

After all, there were already enough things eating into our eyes-closed downtime: a baby, a cough, someone else’s cough and, most significantly for the purposes of today’s article, the cat.

Monty’s idea of a friendly greeting is a headbutt. It is a friendly act, even if he does for some reason think that 4am is the optimal time to express his feelings. He does it to deposit facial pheromones on us and so reaffirm that we’re part of the Monty Gang.

And so to Jonny Bairstow.

According to Cameron Bancroft, “he says hello to people very differently from most others.”

Apparently he does it with a headbutt. “There was nothing malicious about his actions,” added Bancroft. “He didn’t knock me over. I’ve actually got the heaviest head in the West Australian squad, it’s been measured. There’s an actual measurement for it.”

It seems clear that Bairstow was essentially ‘claiming’ Bancroft using his special smell. It’s worth noting that he caught the opener in the first innings, but couldn’t dismiss him in the second. Something had changed.

Pheromones don’t last forever. They need refreshing. If Bancroft gets a 4am knock on his hotel door, he knows what to expect.