Cricket Australia wants to move on from ball tampering saga but its equivocation has the opposite effect | Jonathan Horn

The interminable sandpaper scandal will drag on to the next press conference, social media post or book, until it festers into something much bigger than it needs to be There are some stories that you look back on and wonder whether we lost our collective minds. In Australia, 201

The interminable sandpaper scandal will drag on to the next press conference, social media post or book, until it festers into something much bigger than it needs to be There are some stories that you look back on and wonder whether we lost our collective minds. In Australia, 2018 was not a good year for banking executives, for prime ministers, for oily lord mayors and for cardinals. But the greatest betrayal of trust apparently concerned our national cricket team.

There was public bawling, righteous indignation, weasel words and sanctimonious pieties. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, flanked by a doleful Angus Taylor and a nodding firefighter, called it a “terrible disgrace”. “They now have to make sure this great national game, this great international game that is synonymous with fair play, is once again played by champions that everybody can look up to.” Turnbull was more of a sailing man anyway.

His parliamentary tenure was the political equivalent of Graeme Hick’s cricket career. By the time he’d been punted from office four months later, the Australian cricket team was being reimagined. The Ethics Centre’s 116-page document used the “Everest Process” to ascertain Cricket Australia’s alignment with its ethical framework.

There were lots of charts asking how well CA was adhering to this value or that. “Mostly not lived”, “sometimes lived” and “always lived” were some of the measures. One could have saved a lot of time, money and paper and simply concluded “don’t be a prick, don’t bark like a dog when an opponent is dismissed, and don’t shove sandpaper down your dacks”.

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