Fanie de Villiers asked cameramen to be on the lookout for ball tampering

The recent ball tampering episode in the South Africa vs Australia series has left the entire cricketing fraternity in shock.

People have demeaned Steve Smith, Cameron Bancroft and the Australian ‘leadership group’ in every way possible and are in disbelief as to how the Aussies have degraded the spirit of cricket to such lowly pastures.

And while the cricketing world boils with anger over what has transpired in South Africa, credit needs to be given to the cameramen who had the acumen to follow each and every move of the Australians and get the ball tampering evidence for everyone to see.

The cameramen were apparently tipped off by the Afrikaans commentator Fanie de Villiers who felt that the ball was reversing a bit too early.

“I said earlier on, that if they could get reverse swing in the 26th, 27th, 28th over then they are doing something different from what everyone else does,” de Villiers said

“We actually said to our cameramen, ‘go out [and] have a look, boys. They’re using something.” he added.

The cameramen search for video evidence and found something fishy with how Bancroft was shining the ball. They kept following Bancroft thereafter and hence found the video evidence of him using sandpaper to get the ball to reverse.

“They searched for an hour and a half until they saw something and then they started following Bancroft and they actually caught him out at the end. It’s impossible for the ball to get altered like that on cricket wickets where we knew there was grass on, not a Pakistani wicket where there’s cracks every centimetre.We’re talking about a grass-covered wicket where you have to do something else to alter the shape, to alter the roughness of the ball on the one side. You have to get the one side wetter, heavier than the other side.” de Villiers said.

“Australian teams getting reverse swing before the 30th over, they had to do something. If you use a cricket ball and scratch it against a normal iron or steel gate or anything, anything steel on it, it reverse swings immediately. That’s the kind of extra alteration you need to do,” he concluded.