AS long as games are played, there will be cheating.
As long as there is professional sport, some of those cheats will prosper.
There will be match-fixing and doping and diving and conning.
The enormity of the reaction to the Australian cricket scandal, which erupted at the Cape Town Test against South Africa, will not change any of that.
This Australian team have been a sanctimonious bunch, now shown up as hypocrites with two faces as different as the sides of a tampered ball.
Suddenly they’re the high-horsemen of the apocalypse, in baggy green dunce caps.
The key players — skipper Steve Smith, his deputy dawg David Warner, and their hapless patsy Cameron Bancroft — will be severely punished and tarnished for life as ‘cheats’.
But despite the national outrage, which has echoed around the cricketing world, the Aussies are already in damage-limitation mode.
SMITH BANNED Australian cricket ball tampering scandal: Steve Smith banned and Cameron Bancroft fined after cheating
Their non-stick coach Darren Lehmann will remain in his post — apparently having used his walkie-talkie to order pizza while his team were trying to cover up their skulduggery.
Sportsmen will cheat again. Cricketers will cheat again. After a brief interlude, Australian cricketers will cheat again.
most read in sport
A few lessons will be learned from the shaming of Smith and his men. We’ve learned the startling fact that the Australian cricket board actually employs a ‘head of integrity’ . . .
We also learned that Test cricket still matters and that when cricket goes rogue, it is a matter important enough for heads of state to address.
Another lesson is this: If you’re going to cheat, don’t cheat as brazenly and as badly as the Aussies did. If you’re going to cheat, don’t get caught.
This story is massive, just as the Harlequins rugby union joke-shop blood capsule story was massive because the crime was so utterly stupid.
After all the understandable moralising is done, that’s the reality.
And for England, another key lesson is they must never, ever take lectures from these people again — a fact which Lehmann’s escape only underlines.
England must never be cowed by Australia’s self-appointed status as the morality police of world cricket.
There is nothing in the sporting world to compare with the frothy-mouthed state of the Australian nation during an Ashes series.
The weight of a hostile public and a uniquely one-eyed media was lined up against the England team and they wilted.
Bancroft, memorably, destroyed Jonny Bairstow in deadpan fashion after a playful head-butt in a bar, as Smith tittered alongside him at a press conference.
Nathan Lyon, another of the five-man ‘leadership group’ apparently needed to police an 11-man cricket team, carpet-bombed the Poms with insults about how scared they were of fast bowling.
And in response, England appeared intimidated on and off the field.
Crucially, the ECB refused to allow their best player Ben Stokes to play in their most important series, for fear of upsetting a nation prone to moral outrage.
Stokes had been arrested after an incident outside a Bristol nightclub but he was, and remains, innocent until proven guilty.
That the all-rounder has since been freed to play for England in the current series against New Zealand makes his Ashes ban seem even more ludicrous.
Yet back in Australia, any suggestion that Stokes might have been cleared to play in the Ashes was greeted with a hysteria which frightened the English.
Of course, they can now enjoy the public humiliation of their bitterest rivals — and with many current team members the enmity is deeply personal.
But the lessons England must learn are not the obvious ones about behaving like good boys.
Of course, they must not cheat as obviously as Australia’s disgraced Blue Peter cheaters with their makeshift sticky-tape sandpaper.
Yet most importantly, they must not allow themselves to be bullied into timidity as they were this winter.
DOOM AND BLOOM
BEFORE the Beijing Olympics, I was going to die from smog.
Before the South Africa World Cup I was going to die in a car-jacking — and they sent me to a hotel in Reading where I had to French kiss a hairy bloke off the news desk in a perfunctory stab at first aid.
They told me about improvised explosive devices — and I got a ‘hostile environment training course’ certificate for that one.
Before the Euros in Ukraine, I was going to die amid widespread thuggery and racial hatred.
Before both the World Cup and the Olympics in Rio, I was going to be mugged, kidnapped and murdered by favela dwellers.
An excitable journalist went on the telly and confidently predicted that Roy Hodgson would die and Wayne Rooney would be held hostage there in 2014.
At the Winter Olympics last month, it was a race between hypothermia, the norovirus and nuclear war as to what was going to kill me.
This time it’s espionage and poisoning that will finish me off at the Russia World Cup.
No, I don’t think Russia should be staging this World Cup, nor Qatar the next one — but forgive me if I don’t start wetting myself at all the scare stories.
I’ve heard them all before. And the truth is that people are generally at their best behaviour when there’s a major tournament or an Olympic Games on.
BUNCH OF SILLY ASSES
YOU tend to hear them first.
They honk at each other like sexually frustrated sea lions rather than speaking discernible English.
Then you see them colonising towns, spreading their arms wide and bellowing obscenities in shows of ‘defiance’ against local people quietly going about their business.
Hear them shout about World War II at people whose nations were actually occupied during it.
In Malta last year and again in Amsterdam last Friday, a sizeable minority of England’s travelling fans made you feel thoroughly ashamed.
The FA have now decided that they will not arrange any more Friday-night friendlies in ‘stag do’ venues.
It’s not as if they weren’t warned that a Friday-night trip to Amsterdam was asking for aggro.
The barn door has been slammed after the donkeys bolted.
ARSENE WENGER says Arsenal fans who want him out are driven by ‘age discrimination’.
A run of eight defeats in 13 matches this year suggested it might be to do with ‘results discrimination’.
Sir Alex Ferguson won two league titles while older than the 68-year-old Wenger is now and Manchester United fans hardly ran him out of town.
FORMER England women’s boss Mark Sampson has been accused in a Uefa report of threatening a woman with a metal pole.
He has also been accused of racism and an inappropriate relationship with a female player in a previous job.
He was cleared of racism, but no wonder Phil Neville was waved through after a few sexist gags. After Sampson, the FA’s bar is set remarkably low.
ANTHONY JOSHUA v Joseph Parker ought to be a cracking fight.
But when Sky frontman Adam Smith declared at yesterday’s press conference that the “blue riband heavyweight division has never been more exciting”, you did have to wonder what Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Joe Frazier would have made of it.
AS we head back into league football, just a reminder of a couple of house rules, because some of you haven’t been complying:
1. Don’t mention your fantasy league team in public if you’re older than 12.
2. Nobody cares about near misses on your fixed-odds coupon. You’ve bet on six likely results. It’s not bad luck when five come in and the other doesn’t. Thanks.
Leave a comment