The 2018 sandpaper gate controversy surfaced once again after Australia’s Cameron Bancroft made few bold statements regarding the matter. Bancroft suggested that the bowling unit had an idea about what was happening on the field in Newlands.
The bowling attack consisting of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and off-spinner Nathan Lyon later issued a joint statement denying the claims made by Bancroft.
The former Australian cricketer Ian Chappell has now suggested some alternatives that can help in preventing the players from taking such action.
“I think about 20 years ago, I said what they should do is go to the captains of every country and you get a list of things that they think will help the ball swing. Then you send us all these lists, we’ll go through them and we’ll come up with one thing and it will be a sensible thing, not using a bottle cap to scrape the ball. It’ll be viable but we’ll give you one thing that’ll help you swing the ball and everything else will be illegal,” Chappell said during a discussion on ESPNcricinfo.
He further went on to say that the laws generally favour the batsmen more than the bowlers.
“Let’s look at the way the laws are written. They are pretty much always written in favor of the batsman and if you go right back to underarm bowling to sidearm bowling… to body line and ball-tampering – they all come about because the balance is too much in favor of the batsmen and the bowlers eventually say ‘we have had enough, we are mad as hell and we are going to do something about it’,” he further added.
Bancroft was earlier banned for nine months by Cricket Australia while the then captain Steve Smith and opening batsman David Warner were slapped with a one-year ban each.