With one turning page, the calendar ticks neatly into place. It’s now one year since Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were suspended from playing cricket for Australia under the glare of a global spotlight. With one orbit of the sun, the longer bans handed to Smith and Warner are due to expire. But leaving aside those players and their fates, where has the Cape Town ball-tampering scandal left the team and the game?
At the time, the departing captain and his deputy left a massive hole in the men’s international sides. The Test team was demolished in its next outing in Johannesburg, faced with a fourth-innings chase of over 600 runs and eventually losing by nearly 500. The one-day international team didn’t fare much better, sacked for a world record score of 481 by England amidst a series whitewash a couple of months later. The Twenty20 team was whitewashed by Pakistan in October before more series were lost in the other formats over a home summer.
But the interim wasn’t predominantly about results. It was about how to bring health back into a culture in the men’s game that had sickened. The raft of sackings and resignations at the top administrative level have left the promise of an organisation that could be different, but the real test will be over the next few years when the pressure is less intense, not the previous year when it was at its highest.
Life in the women’s teams goes on apace, because they were never any trouble to begin with. Life in the men’s teams is a very different beast, though the coach who presided over their decline and disarray first jumped into the commentary box to be presented as an esteemed expert, then was signed up for another tilt at leadership by the Brisbane Heat. Jobs at the top end loop like a baggage carousel.
Darren Lehmann was replaced by Justin Langer, who shares an era and much of an outlook but differs in intensity and breadth, and has a more concrete idea of what the team should look like. He laid it out again as Smith and Warner met with the ODI squad in the Middle East as a step in their so-called “reintegration”, despite the fact that only a couple of short-form players were involved in 2018’s Test tour to South Africa.
“We set some values nine or 10 months ago and we looked at how we’re going with those values, and how we can use our values and our behaviours to keep moving the team forward on and off the field. We talked about making Australians proud, we talked about great cricketers and great people,” was Langer’s précis of events.
The returning players reflected that line as expected. “Going through the values that are instilled in the team at the moment and making sure we’re on the right path,” was Smith’s summary of what they had discussed. “Making sure that we’re aligned with the team values moving forward,” offered Warner.
Not that either of them was singlehandedly driving the aggressive and abrasive culture a year earlier. They were willing enablers in what was pushed on them as the way Australian cricket should be. After this approach imploded, emergency Test captain Tim Paine was the first to voice the realisation that it attracted far less support from the cricket-watching public than from a small coterie of former players and current managers.
“We need to listen to our fans and the Australian public and give them a cricket team that they are proud of – win, lose or draw,” he said in Johannesburg a couple of days after taking the reins. The formulation was his own, but Langer has taken it on, softened his approach as coach to accord with it despite coming from a combative era as a player. Respect and intimidation are no longer seen as interchangeable.
There’s also the civilising influence of a younger and different generation. If you ever want to summarise how rigid and stifling conventional Australian masculinity can be, just look at the incredulous reaction at the Australian Cricket awards night to Marcus Stoinis wearing a hat. The all-rounder dressed up with fellow cricketer Ben Abbotangelo in fetching white dinner jackets, flat caps, loud socks and oversized specs, having a mid-range bit of fun with their outfits. But the television presenters kept elbowing the crowd in its collective ribcage as though this was the most outré fashion experiment ever attempted. “Oh-hohhhh, what about these outfits! What is going on?” It was the kind of response you’d expect to a parsley garnish in the 1950s.
There was similar bemused incomprehension during a match against Pakistan last week, as a camera during an ad break stayed on a shot of Stoinis while Adam Zampa put an arm around him and patted his head, and Stoinis nuzzled back in for more. It was a lovely show of affection between men who aren’t terrified of it, in contrast to the beefy Top Gun hugs that accompany each centre-wicket celebration, with cricketers meatily thudding together as though fired by a Large Haddin Collider. But the more thoughtful types are growing in number with players like Joe Burns, Kurtis Patterson and Jhye Richardson around the scene.
The on-field state of the game remains a mixed bag. The Test team is in stasis but not in shape, like a half-crocked car that you stash in the garage for six months to avoid thinking about. For a year the batting has been weak and the bowlers have been excellent on paper but less so on turf. Smith and Warner will be vital for the Ashes in England to remedy the former of those problems, and give the bowlers enough rest to remedy the latter.
The one-day team is suddenly in better nick: first came a streak of four wins in 26 matches, but then a streak of five wins in a row. By rights of occupation neither Smith nor Warner could command a spot. Usman Khawaja and Aaron Finch have started dominating as an opening pair, Shaun Marsh is racking up hundreds at first drop, Peter Handscomb has excelled as the middle-order engine, and the all-rounders aren’t expendable.
Fitting in the returning players will take an injury, some deeply creative accounting, or most likely a deep injustice. Which does raise the question of exactly how much twisting should be done to accommodate those who vacated their spots through their own ethical failure. For administrators to prove that things are meaningfully different now, perhaps the best way would be if no concessions are made at all.