Australia began 2018 on a high after regaining the Ashes but the feel-good factor vaporised a few months later when the ball-tampering saga unfolded in Cape Town a couple of months later. Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were handed bans for trying to change the condition of the ball in the Cape Town Test against South Africa in March. One year down the road, current captain Tim Paine gave his insights on how the Kangaroos dealt with the body blow and how they plan to move ahead in an action-packed cricketing calendar.
“I haven’t thought about it a lot. It was disappointing for all of us involved. I think you’ve got to keep looking forward. You can’t keep worrying about the past” he said to Cricbuzz.
“We’ve made a commitment to ourselves as a group, and as a team, that we want to get better and we don’t want to do things like that ever again. We want to play good cricket that our supporters and our country can be proud of. We are all about looking forward.” Paine added.
“We are really looking forward to get those guys (Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft) back in around our team, and I think when that happens, we can completely sort of start to move forward. There’s always been that sort of in the background, where we’re trying to move forward but we know that these guys are going to be back at some stage. So it’ll be great when they actually are back, and we can all look into the future,” he added.
Reflecting back on the day when he was appointed as the skipper, Paine said, “Yeah it was surreal. But I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. I’d say I’m starting to now enjoy it. Now we’re getting back to some normality. But certainly, at the start, it wasn’t a nice feeling for anyone to be there, playing in those circumstances. As I said, you have to dust yourself off and move forward, and that’s what we are trying to do.”
