Chris Rattue: Stop the lies - other Aussies must have suspected something in cricket scandal

David Warner - the man everyone loves to hate. Photo / AAP

Did you hear the one about an Aussie cricketer who was rubbing bright yellow tape on the ball and no one else in his team noticed?

It's a joke and a punch line all in one, but then again the whole game of cricket is a running gag in which a corrupt sport wields superior airs and graces.

Faced with an iconic moment of cheating, Australian cricket has been allowed to investigate its own team, hand out the punishments and effectively ring-fence the leaders.

Going down this road, cycling should have sorted out its greatest PR problem by letting Lance Armstrong investigate Lance Armstrong (which was kind of happening for quite a while).

The ICC, it seems, sees itself as an innocent bystander rather than sporting leader.
If you add up all the "incidents" then cricket is in the gutter alongside drug-fuelled cycling, and in desperate need of willpower from above.

The remarkable thing about cricket is the range of its transgressions, from betting scandals to ball tampering to the disgusting sledging campaigns which replaced the humorous if still cutting barbs which used to fly between the world's best players.

Australian cricket is throwing the book at captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner and tape monitor Cameron Bancroft after this morning exonerating everyone else in the team, but it's impossible to believe that the culpability for ball doctoring against South Africa is so confined.

Does Cricket Australia expect us to believe that highly skilled bowlers with a lifetime of trying to make the ball talk wouldn't notice if the cherry suddenly started yapping like a talkback host?

Surely someone else on the field must have noticed that bright yellow tape in Bancroft's possession.

Because ball tampering loses its effectiveness if the player delivering the ball doesn't know he is dealing with a different animal. In other words, if the ball is swinging differently, you bowl differently, set fields differently, perhaps even grip the ball differently.

Come on people. We don't know who talked to who before the game, but other players in the team HAD to know something was going on. They are not that stupid, and we are not that stupid. Darren Lehmann will have spotted something.

But that's cricket.

As most Kiwi sports lovers know, New Zealand is not squeaky clean, a well aimed bottle top helping Chris Pringle destroy a Pakistan batting line up in 1990.

England used a mix of saliva and peppermints to out-swing Australia in the Ashes, and one of their players even spilt a load of the sweets in front of an umpire at Headingley in the 2001 series.

In other words, ball doctoring is a dark art carried out in bright sunlight, and it's been going on for a long time.

A lot of the venom being aimed at Australia right now is because they are Australian.

The world has been waiting to get back at the Aussies, for being so arrogant and so good. Players like little David Warner get up people's goat. Years of watching ruthless Australian teams twist the knife has left its scars.

The world has always had trouble celebrating the sheer brilliance of people like Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist, because they were part of the hard-nosed, unsmiling Aussie set-up. Now we can roll up all the anger and jealousy and stick it to some yellow tape.

But Australia is not alone, far from it.

Cricket has been soft-soaping blatant acts against the spirit of the game since the infamous 1970s occasion when Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh got away with betting on opponents England to win a test, from an impossible position, which they did. Cricket's blind eye has no boundary or borders.

Call me cynical, but I believe spot fixing remains an integral part of cricket, in the same way that drugs remain in cycling. Yet it has often been left to the media to expose the crooks.

From the late South African shyster Hansie Cronje to Steve Smith and a lot of points in between, cricket is a dirty sport. Just as Bancroft's team mates must have known that something was going on, all those good clean cricketers — many who are getting filthy rich — will have their suspicions about what goes on around them.

Australian cricket's culture is under question, but it should be cricket worldwide which is in the dock.

To hijack the famous Edmund Burke line, the only thing necessary for a sport to remain dodgy is for the good men to do nothing. And when it comes to doing nothing, cricket is world class.