The Australian response to the ball-tampering scandal has surprised many in South Africa, whose knee-jerk response to any attack, legitimate or not, is resolute defence, writes Telford Vice.
South Africa are champion ball-tamperers. They’ve been rumbled three times since 2013, twice with the villain in chief the player who is now their captain, the other with a senior fast bowler in the role.
If they were as good at winning World Cups as they were at being nabbed for unfairly changing the condition of the ball, the nation wouldn’t have to hold its breath for weeks on end every four years.
Or are South Africa bad at ball-tampering considering they keep getting caught?
Whatever. Not once out of those three times did a high-ranking suit get on a plane to find out what the hell was going on.
How they must have marvelled at Smith and Bancroft looking back at the room like sheep surveying the looming slaughterhouse and saying things said only by those who have acknowledged that they have committed the gravest of crimes. Real crimes, and even then only if they are arguing in mitigation of sentence.
They must have been exponentially more surprised when they woke on Sunday to reports of Australia’s prime minister voicing his unveiled condemnation, to say nothing of the deluge of disgust that has flooded in from the cricket world and beyond and from everyone and everything that carries even the faintest whiff of being Australian.
So all this Aussie angst is being received in South Africa with the kind of wonder that would greet the discovery of a real, live Tasmanian emu, which has been extinct since 1850.
That same year, on April 23, Cape Town was brought to a standstill by a mass meeting that resolved to petition Queen Victoria to grant the Cape a government.
We’ve been tough for a long time. At least, we like to think so. Just like the Aussies.
