Sixteen days before Cameron Bancroft was caught hiding a piece of sandpaper down his pants, someone knocked on the door of my hotel room in Port Elizabeth, where the second Test between Australia and South Africa was about to begin.
asserted
Test → catch → Australia
It was about lunchtime, but I hadn’t ordered any food, and the housekeeping staff had already been around that morning.
asserted
staff → order → food
Instead, as I got up and answered the door, I realised it was a delivery of another kind – a USB stick.
asserted
it → get → kind
For a sports journalist covering cricket, this was not a common occurrence.
asserted
this → cover → cricket
But a spiteful first Test in Durban in the preceding days had already given the impression this was not going to be your average tour.
asserted
this → precede → impression
On the thumb drive, as I discovered when I plugged it into my laptop, was unseen footage of an incident that had lit up the series just as it had begun – a stairwell clash between David Warner and South Africa wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock.
asserted
it → discover → Warner
In a contest that was already brimming with tension, the clip showed the altercation from a different camera angle than the earlier leak to South African media and made for a fresh round of headlines.
asserted
clip → brim → headlines
I wasn’t to know that by the next leg of the tour in Cape Town, the vision would be rendered a footnote to one of cricket’s most infamous episodes.
asserted
vision → know → episodes
Whenever I’m asked about reporting on the ball-tampering scandal of 2018 for the Herald and The Age in South Africa, I always remind people that Australia’s series there that year was already radioactive before it exploded at Newlands.
asserted
it → ask → Newlands
The days and weeks that followed the Australian team’s self-destruction on day three of the third Test were chaotic as Warner, Bancroft and captain Steve Smith were sent home.
asserted
Warner → follow → Test
In a piece in the hours after Bancroft was exposed, I said that the Cape Town affair was the biggest captaincy crisis since Greg Chappell told his brother Trevor to bowl underarm.
asserted
Chappell → expose → brother
As it turned out, that was underplaying it spectacularly.
asserted
that → turn → it
Newlands was the setting for Australian cricket to tip over the edge.
asserted
cricket → tip → edge
Writing about it was an assignment like no other.
asserted
Writing → write → other
On my first night in South Africa, I was sipping a pint of Castle Lager at a hotel bar in Durban and heard that Australia wanted to have the stump microphones turned down when they were in the field.
asserted
they → sip → field
The inference was obvious – the tourists didn’t want their on-field utterances towards the South Africans to be picked up by the viewing public as they tended to be when playing in the country, where the dial was usually kept up.
asserted
dial → want → country
The request to Supersport, the South African network that televised the series and eventually zeroed in on Bancroft in Cape Town, was ignored.
asserted
that → televise → Town
Some in the Australian camp would later come to believe the broadcaster was weaponised against them in following the ball around as they fielded – to an ultimately devastating effect.
asserted
they → come → effect
In Durban, Australia’s initial reaction to the stump microphones being left on was light-hearted.
asserted
reaction → leave → microphones
With some impromptu ambush marketing, they used the opportunity to promote Cricket Australia’s sponsors.
asserted
they → use → sponsors
“How good is Qantas?” one player was heard saying to one of the umpires, whose sponsor was Emirates.
asserted
sponsor → hear → umpires
But it did not take long for an atmosphere of enmity to intensify, stirred up by alleged insults traded by Warner and de Kock.
asserted
atmosphere → take → Warner
The press pack was staying in the same hotel as the Australians, and I remember an annoyed Warner turning up in the breakfast room the morning after his run-in with de Kock.
asserted
Warner → stay → Kock
Warner was not a bystander in proceedings, but he had been incensed by the gloveman’s alleged sledging about his wife Candice and strongly denied directing personal and family-related barbs of his own towards de Kock.
asserted
he → incense → Kock
There was brief calm after we flew to Port Elizabeth for the second Test.
asserted
we → be → Test
The Australians brought with them a 1-0 lead, and Mitchell Marsh led morning dips in the surf opposite their luxury beachside lodgings.
asserted
Marsh → bring → lodgings
But it did not take long for the hostility to ramp back up again.
asserted
hostility → take → ?
I just about fell off my chair in the press box at St George’s Park just after stumps one day when a source texted a photo of South African cricket officials posing with spectators wearing Sonny Bill Williams masks.
asserted
source → fall → masks
It took the heckling of Warner’s wife to a new level, who had many years earlier had a dalliance with the cross-code football star and was in the crowd with her and Warner’s two young daughters.
asserted
who → take → her
South African paceman Kagiso Rabada’s shoving of Australian captain Steve Smith after dismissing him had further flared tempers, and in a harbinger of things to come, distrust was also building about the two teams’ production of reverse swing – and how they were achieving it.
asserted
they → dismiss → it
So much had gone on that by the time South Africa won in Port Elizabeth, levelling the series 1-1, the other Australian reporters and I took a collective breath as we paid a visit to the Addo Elephant National Park, thinking that the tour had surely hit its quota of nastiness and notoriety.
asserted
tour → go → nastiness
A nine-day break before the third Test in Cape Town put some distance between the rivals and offered those of us writing about them some downtime to explore the city and its surroundings.
asserted
break → put → city
We spent a few mornings climbing Table Mountain and Lion’s Head, visited Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was once imprisoned, and joined team media manager Kate Hutchison and security manager Frank Dimasi for lunch at a winery in Stellenbosch.
asserted
Mandela → spend → Stellenbosch
I don’t know if Kate had access to a crystal ball, but as we gorged ourselves on a four-course meal and took in the view of the surrounding mountain ranges, she told us she had decided to move on from the often gruelling job after the tour.
asserted
she → know → tour
When we got to Newlands, we sat down with Smith in a couple of rows of uncovered seating at the ground.
asserted
we → get → ground
He admitted he was tired after the Ashes in the previous Australian summer.
asserted
he → admit → summer
He was also irritated by Rabada’s surprise exoneration for shoulder barging him, questioning why he wasn’t called as a witness to the appeal hearing, as well as a claim on South African bowler Vernon Philander’s social media account that he had taken a dive.
uncertain
he → irritate → dive
Smith was not amused at Philander’s insistence that he had been hacked.
asserted
he → amuse → insistence
The Cape Town Test featured more abuse of players’ partners from beyond the boundary and a verbal run-in between Warner and a crowd member after he was bowled by Rabada in the first innings.
asserted
he → feature → innings
When I asked coach Darren Lehmann about the targeting of families in a press conference on the second evening, he called it “disgraceful”.
asserted
he → ask → it
…and 35 more, not listed.
The Aporia
