Tim Paine has opened up on the infamous Sandpapergate that rocked Australian cricket, revealing the entire team was “stunned” in the wake of the controversy.
The former Australian Test captain also accused a rival team of ball-tampering, claiming he “saw it happen” but that it was covered up.
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Writing in his newly-released autobiography, The Price Paid, Paine touched on a number of key chapters in his career, including the sexting scandal that saw him stand down as skipper.
Paine also wrote extensively about the ball-tampering scandal in Cape Town and one of his biggest regrets — that Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith and David Warner had to cop the brunt of the scrutiny.
While there have been suggestions the rest of the team must have been aware of the ball-tampering, Paine labelled such claims as “rubbish”.
“Cricketers keep a lot to themselves, even in the happiest teams. Coaches and support staff do the same,” Paine wrote.
“Everyone out there was shocked when they looked up on the big screen and saw Cameron Bancroft with a piece of sandpaper in his hand. I was stunned. We all were.”
Paine wrote that he had heard about players “taping small pieces of sandpaper onto their fingers” in the past but that this was “next level”.
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“It was a Test match and it was on the big screen and it looked terrible,” he added.
“My heart sank, I was thinking, ‘What the f—?’ A sense of dread came over us all.”
And that was just the start, with the key trio of Bancroft, Smith and Warner waiting to learn their fate, with Paine writing that the latter felt “abandoned” in the wake of the incident.
“Steve and Cam were alone,” he wrote.
“Things were tense and horrible. I think Davey felt abandoned and that nobody was looking out for him.”
While Paine maintained that no other player knew of the ball-tampering he wrote that the team still should have taken shared responsibility given Warner’s role as ‘ball manager’ was to the benefit of the entire squad.
“Everyone was a part of it to some degree — would it have worked out better for those three players if we had owned it as a team? I think it would have,” Paine wrote.
Paine added that all three players “should have had more support”, although he wrote that Warner in particular faced increased scrutiny from fans in particular.
“… One grub followed Dave up the race, yelling from a metre or two away after he’d just got out,” he wrote.
“I don’t know how Bull kept his cool in those situations and on reflection I feel the team let him down by not offering him more support. He was turning up every day as if nothing was bothering him, but that’s Dave. I can see now he was making a lot of pain and we should have known it. I can only imagine what it was like to be going through that with your wife and little girls.
“… For a while there he cut himself off from all of us and removed himself from the team WhatsApp group and I can understand that. The personal abuse was taking its toll before this, but things had gone from bad to worse.
“On reflection all three of them should have had more support. Maybe we could have done more as a group or organisation, not enough people put themselves in their shoes.”
Paine also went on to accuse South Africa of ball-tampering in the following Test match, claiming it was covered up by broadcasters at the ground.
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“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.
“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.”
