Greg Chappell on Australian cricket’s road to Cape Town sandpaper crisis

“Oh mate, but you’ve been sledding with other teams.”

“Man, the banter continued, the luge continued, but without haranguing opposing players and certainly not in a premeditated way. This has never been acceptable in any workplace, let alone a cricket ground, and it shouldn’t be acceptable now.″⁣

“No mate, you have to do this to win.”

Why did Darren think this was how Australia always played? Probably because of the emphasis on “mental disintegration” when Darren played most of his international matches, during Steve Waugh’s hugely successful time as captain.

While this sort of thing was sometimes seen under Allan Border and Mark Taylor, in Steve’s day it was becoming acceptable to stand there and harangue an opposing player as a common tactic. Over the generations, it went from a necessity to something like a badge of honor to be able to get the opposition’s nose up faster than they could get ours up.

Loading

There was a period before Cape Town when many of us had the same feeling. We couldn’t tell you what the glitch or explosion would be, but we knew something sinister was afoot. Basically “it’s not going to end well”. As a manager, subject to more advice than any other job in cricket, everywhere I went in my daily life, I was reminded of the behavior of the team every day. People were turning off the television in droves, furious at some of the things they were seeing. Alarm bells were ringing.

Another contributing factor at the start of 2018, critical in terms of team leadership, was that Steve Smith was a shell of himself.

At the previous Ashes in Australia, he’d had a big streak, put a lot of effort into it and was clearly exhausted. Partly that was because he wasn’t hitting the ball well, so he had to spend a lot of time on his runs. I didn’t know exactly how exhausted I was until I spoke to him in Perth towards the end of the third Test at the WACA Ground, where Australia found the Ashes.

Steve was sitting on one of the physio benches, staring off into space; I walked into the room towards him and he didn’t notice anyone was there. I said ‘how are you’ and he blinked and said ‘Oh mate, I’m gone. I don’t sleep, I don’t eat… in a Test match I can’t do anything All I can do is play cricket and go back to my room.

I could relate to that, because there were times when all I could do from one day to the next as captain was just go to my room, eat something and relax. fall asleep as soon as possible to save enough energy for the next day. . But he had gone beyond that, because he was so tense he couldn’t even rest his mind without sleeping pills.

So he was a shell of a man in mid-December, and that contributed to what we saw in South Africa a few months later. This basically meant there was one less adult in the room. I have no doubt that everything that happened in Newlands happened around Steve, because I don’t believe he was even capable of participating in any type of conspiracy. He had become extremely tired and withdrawn.

I had a lot of empathy for Steve. Just as he had his crisis in South Africa, I had mine at the MCG in 1981. I didn’t see it coming, and I don’t know if anyone saw it coming. I hadn’t realized until that day how tense I was. And I don’t think anyone around me knew that. So it’s a bit hard to see it coming when you’re right in the middle. I think I could see it coming for Steve, especially after that day in Perth, just as I saw it coming for Kim Hughes 33 years before.

We had also seen an increasingly cavalier attitude to the way the ball was ‘handled’, not just at international level but in the Sheffield Shield. For many years, the practice of scraping the ball had continued in plain sight. Everyone knew about it, but nobody did much about it, and when someone got caught, they got a slap on the wrist.

Loading

By the summer of 2017-18, it was becoming increasingly clear that many states cared very little about trying to move the new ball and instead did everything they could to turn it into an “old” ball the as quickly as possible.

As bad as the Newlands ball tampering incident itself looked on the pitch, the ensuing press conference was nothing but a train wreck. As a manager, Darren Lehmann really should have come to that press conference and said: “It’s under investigation, we can’t say anything at this stage, we’ll talk about it once the conclusion is made.”

Instead, Steve Smith thought that, in line with previous penalties for ball tampering, he would recognize it, they would get a slap on the wrist and move on. But it misinterpreted the situation and ultimately served to fuel the flames already lit. I know the team was advised not to approach the press conference the way Smith and Cameron Bancroft did. Ignoring this advice was yet another symptom of the bubble.

Pat Howard asked me after Cape Town if I thought we had a ‘win at all costs’ attitude. I said, ‘Buddy, if you walked away for a little while, you’d see that’s what we did, and that led to what we saw in Newlands. Pat was upset by all of this, and that he may have unwittingly played a part in it.

Pat, of course, was trying to achieve certain goals from the first day of his job in 2011, and these were to see the Australian team finish No. 1 in all forms of play while winning Cups. of the world at the same time. We were toeing the old line of Tiger Woods that “second time sucks, and third time sucks,” regardless of any other factors that might be at play. It must be said now that there were people within CA who sensed and made it known from day one that this was wrong and was going to cause problems.

The counter-opinion was that all we can hope to do is be competitive in every game we play, and the ranking will be whatever it is based on how much talent we have compared to the rest of the world. I certainly made it known at the time that if we did that there would be side effects and consequences.

The approach taken by CA also went against everything we had increasingly known about how the best athletes in elite sport conducted their activities: a process-oriented approach that eliminated as many results pressures. A results-oriented approach, on the other hand, created a sense of worthlessness or failure at anything other than major success.

In the end, each of us in the organization was guilty. We’ve all walked past things we shouldn’t have walked through, up and down. There were opportunities to speak out as an organization and we didn’t. One of the realities of such a long build-up is that it may still be a generation or two before the mean and premeditated luge crutch is completely abandoned by Australian players. I’m not entirely convinced that the good work of the last three years has completely wiped it out: undeniably, some cricketers still feel that it’s a worthwhile competitive advantage.

New Zealand, now the reigning world champion in Test cricket, has proven beyond doubt that it’s just not something you need in your arsenal to succeed. In many ways, the type of cricket played by Kane Williamson’s side – solid hitting with proactive running between the wickets, sharp fielding and precision bowling with a combination of speed, rebound, swing and seam – is the kind that the australia has made its mark over many generations. before the sled became a tactical weapon.

This is an edited excerpt from Not out by Greg Chappell with Daniel Brettig, published by Hardie Grant Books on November 3.