JUSTIN LANGER: Australia’s ‘sandpaper saga’ trio took the fall on ball-tampering for all cricketers

“Pray that’s not Cameron, Gracie”.

“What do you mean Dad”, was the reply from my 13-year-old youngest daughter.

Deep down I knew it was Cameron’s hand holding a suspicious piece of yellow paper being stuffed down the front of his trousers.

Still, for a second, I prayed.

It was the tea break in Cape Town, and Gracie and I had just sat down on the couch to watch the last session of the cricket.

As I clicked the remote control, the first thing we saw was the hand. Cameron’s hand.

I knew this was a disaster. A very sad disaster.

From there, a succession of events sparked mayhem. A chain of events that will leave a visible scar forever.

Captain Steve Smith was frog marched out of South Africa. You could have mistaken him for a world’s most wanted man after capture.

Our Prime Minister banged his chest. Cricket Australia held an enquiry. Bans were enforced. Tears flowed. Blood was shed.

Within a short period, Australian cricket’s chairman, CEO, high-performance manager, head coach, captain, vice-captain and others had left the building; leaving a vacuum of leadership, that some would say has never truly been filled. (David Boon was appointed interim chair of CA this week. He is the sixth chair in nine years. Sounds like Australian politics.)

I was appointed head coach at that time. What a mess.

The strong message coming from the top was, ‘we don’t care if you win or lose, we just need to earn back respect from the Australian public and across the world’.

Newly-appointed captain Tim Paine and I came up with the words “Make Australians Proud” of the team again. We spoke to those words nearly every day of our tenure together.

Simply put, if our players, through their actions on and off the field, would make their families and friends proud of them, then we would be on the right path.

That didn’t just mean being model citizens, it also meant playing good cricket, because all Australians want to see this from their sporting teams.

Hopefully we achieved this in that time.

Looking back, and to this day, I still can’t understand how a young man like Cameron — playing in only his eighth Test match for Australia — had got himself in that predicament.

Having lived my adult life in Australian cricket changing rooms, I cannot fathom it. Having known Cameron since he was a schoolboy, I will say it again: you could line up a thousand young blokes, and he would be the last I would expect that to happen to. The mind boggles.

In many ways, Smith, Bancroft and David Warner, took the fall, not only for Australia but for all cricketers around the world.

Notice the ball hasn’t reverse swung anywhere in the world since Cape Town 2018. Rarely anyway. I wonder why?

Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff summed it up the best back then. When the hysteria was at fever pitch, and the Australian cricket team was back in the dark ages of public stoning, he simply wrote: “Those in glass houses.”

Say no more.

I think about sprinters Ben Johnson and Marion Jones and cyclist Lance Armstrong.

They stand as towering reminders of how quickly sporting greatness can crumble under the weight of doping revelations. Their falls sent shockwaves through the sporting world that reverberated for decades.

Every time our two countries meet, the narrative of Cape Town 2018 will re-open the wounds.

These three athletes became unwilling architects of a new anti-doping regime, their public humiliation and career destruction serving as a barrier against future cheaters. Their falls from grace didn’t just damage their legacies; they fundamentally altered how sport’s governing bodies approached testing, enforcement, and punishment.

On Friday, Australia returns to South Africa to play the first Test match of another highly-anticipated series.

No doubt they will be greeted by hostile South African fans reminding them of their last visit. They will have become immune to such banter, although it will still sting.

The last time the two teams met, South Africa won the World Test Championship at Lords last year. They are a very good team, although they are hampered by injuries to a couple of their best fast bowlers.

That match proved that it is likely this series will be far less hostile than eight years ago.

That 2018 series became a powder keg of on-field tension, heated confrontations, and disciplinary breaches that set the stage for cricket’s most damaging moment.

The first Test in Durban ignited the friction with multiple incidents. Nathan Lyon ran out AB de Villiers for a duck and, in celebration, dropped the ball which grazed de Villiers’ chest as he lay on the ground. Lyon was fined 15 per cent of his match fee for the Level 1 breach.

Then came the more serious confrontation when David Warner and South African wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock clashed in the players’ tunnel at tea on day four. CCTV footage captured the fiery exchange, with Warner reportedly losing his temper after de Kock allegedly went overboard with personal remarks.

The second Test brought fresh drama when South African pace bowler Kagiso Rabada aggressively celebrated Steve Smith’s dismissal, bumping hard into the Australian captain. The contact sparked immediate debate and Rabada faced suspension from the remainder of the series, a decision that was controversially overturned.

Then of course came Sandpapergate where the on-field pressure and tension spiralled out of control.

This series is sure to be played hard, but we can expect it to be played in the right spirits.

Australia have made some surprising selections, none more so than that of Nic Maddinson, who hasn’t played first class cricket for 20 months and wasn’t selected in the current Australian A squad.

Every time our two countries meet, the narrative of Cape Town 2018 will re-open the wounds. Let’s hope that the game of Test cricket is the winner over the next three weeks.