Former England captain, Alastair Cook has reportedly claimed in his upcoming autobiography that Australia’s David Warner had confessed to him about a ball-tampering incident before the Sandpapergate scandal stormed the headlines. This event supposedly happened in a first-class game during the 2017-18 Ashes.
In an excerpt from the book, as mentioned by The Guardian, Cook had written the following: “David Warner, a couple of beers into his celebration, mentioned that he used substances attached to the strapping on his hand to accelerate the deterioration of the ball during a first-class match. I looked at Steve Smith who shot a glance that said: ‘Ooh, you shouldn’t have said that.”
Steve Smith and David Warner, the then captain and vice-captain of the Australian team that toured South Africa in 2018, were handed a year-long ban from cricket for their involvement in the Sandpapergate. Whereas, Cameron Bancroft, who actually did the act of rubbing the ball against sandpaper to deteriorate its condition in the middle of the pitch, was given a nine-month-long ban.
“Stuart Broad sums it up pretty well and says they got the ball to reverse swing in that Ashes. Why change what you’ve been doing? Why suddenly use sandpaper? People know what was going on. But it’s been the best thing for Australian cricket because they realized it wasn’t acceptable. The win-at-all-costs culture they created isn’t what the Australian public needed or wanted. They’d gone too far,” Cook said in an interview to The Guardian.
Meanwhile, Australia have successfully managed to retain the Ashes as they are 2-1 up in the five-match series. Ahead of the series, England were looking quite confident of maintaining their record and not letting the visitors win, as they had done in the past 18 years, but the newly-crowned World Champions failed to live up to the billing.
Both the teams will now travel to The Oval for the fifth and final Test of the series which begins from 12th September.
Feature Image Courtesy: AFP/ Randy Brooks
