Completely agree. Sutherland doesn’t understand the game if he think’s there’s any point in ball tampering if the quicks aren’t in on the cunning plot.
The whole point of reverse swing is after the ball deteriorates (either naturally or accelerated by tampering) and if you bowl fast enough, a natural outswinger becomes an inswinger and an inswinger into an outswinger - the bowler has to know what he’s attempting and where to pitch the ball or he’ll just be bowling wides all day long.
Sutherland hasn’t conducted any kind of genuine attempt to get at the truth, he’s just flown over, asked those involved for their side of the story and accepted their version. The same players whose initial reaction was to cover up their cheating with BS about black cloths for dusting sunglasses and yellow sticky tape when it was really sandpaper while stuffing the evidence down their jock straps. Obviously the fast bowlers knew, Mitch Starc for certain, probably other senior players and in all likelihood the whole changing room - did the 12th man look remotely surprised when Lehman phoned him and ordered him onto the pitch to tell Bancroft he’d been sprung? he just smirked, rolled his eyes and picked up a helmet to run on with to get the cover up underway.
Until the full truth emerges and the whole team gets outed as cheats, Australian Cricket will continue to live with the stain. There was a time when Australian captains had the common decency to cry at press conferences when the were resigning for just being crap and losing. Kim Hughes wasn’t feeling sorry for himself, he had let down his country by just not being very good. Bancroft’s sorry somebody less deserving of his Test spot will be playing while he has to get a real job. Smith just blubbed like a baby out of self pity. Lehman’s sorry for the delicate emotional state of these cheats. Warner hasn’t even got the decency to cry, he gets Mrs Warner to do that for him.
