The Newlands Ball-Tampering Affair and Its Australian Aftermath

The Australia ball tampering affair happened on 24 March 2018, the third day of the third Test against South Africa at Newlands in Cape Town, when television cameras caught opening batter Cameron Bancroft applying sandpaper to one side of the match ball and then hiding it inside his clothing. Cricket Australia banned captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner for twelve months and Bancroft for nine, added leadership bans on top for the two senior men, and within eight months had lost its coach, its chief executive, its chairman, its team performance manager and a board member who had captained the country.

That gap between the size of the act and the size of the consequence is the whole story. Under the Laws of Cricket, changing the condition of the ball is a minor offence: five penalty runs to the batting side and the option of a ball change. The International Cricket Council treated it accordingly, suspending Smith for a single Test and fining Bancroft three quarters of a match fee. What made Newlands the largest crisis in modern Australian sport was not the sandpaper but everything around it — that the plan was discussed in a dressing room before it was carried out, that a player with eight Tests to his name was the one asked to do it, and that the account given to reporters at the close of play that evening did not match what had happened.

This page sets out the sequence of events, the two separate sets of sanctions and why they differed so sharply, the cultural review that followed and what it actually said, the departures, the sponsors, the way the bans were served, the returns, and the long unwinding of David Warner's leadership ban, which was not lifted until December 2024. It is a factual account. Australians have argued about the moral weight of Newlands for years and will keep doing so; that argument is not the purpose here.

The series that led into it

The 2018 tour of South Africa was hostile before a ball was tampered with. The first Test at Durban ended with a stairwell confrontation between David Warner and Quinton de Kock over remarks about Warner's wife, captured on venue security footage and released afterwards. Both were charged. In the second Test at Port Elizabeth, South African fast bowler Kagiso Rabada was initially suspended for making contact with Steve Smith during a celebration, then had the charge downgraded on appeal, which Australians read as inconsistent and South Africans read as the visitors complaining.

By the time the sides reached Cape Town at 1-1, the series had a running theme of crowd taunting, mask wearing in the stands and daily code of conduct headlines. It is context, not excuse. But it matters for understanding the decision, because the Australian dressing room had spent three weeks convinced it was being outplayed in the reverse swing contest and outmanoeuvred off the field.

Reverse swing was the specific technical problem. On dry, abrasive South African outfields, the ball scuffs quickly and starts to swing towards the shine at high pace once the rough side is dry enough. South Africa's attack was extracting it earlier in the innings than Australia's. Roughening one side artificially accelerates that process. That is what the sandpaper was for.

Day three, 24 March 2018

South Africa were batting in their second innings and building a substantial lead. Just after the drinks break in the middle session, host broadcaster SuperSport's cameras followed Bancroft as he took a small yellow object from his pocket and ran it across the ball. Realising the ground's big screen was showing the footage, he moved the object down the front of his trousers.

Umpires Richard Illingworth and Nigel Llong called him over. Bancroft produced a black sunglasses cloth from his pocket. The umpires inspected the ball, judged that its condition had not been altered enough to warrant action, and did not change it. No five penalty runs were awarded. In pure playing terms, nothing happened at all.

1. 1Day three at NewlandsOn 24 March 2018 broadcast cameras show Cameron Bancroft applying an object to the ball during South Africa's second innings, and he conceals it when the big screen replays the footage.
2. 2The umpires inspectRichard Illingworth and Nigel Llong ask Bancroft what he is holding, he shows them a sunglasses cloth, and they decide the ball's condition does not warrant a change or penalty runs.
3. 3The evening press conferenceSteve Smith and Bancroft appear together at the close of play, admit a deliberate plan by what Smith calls the leadership group, and describe the object as sticky tape carrying ground dirt.
4. 4The ICC charges landWithin a day the International Cricket Council suspends Smith for one Test and fines him his full match fee, and gives Bancroft three demerit points and a 75 per cent fine.
5. 5Cricket Australia investigatesIntegrity chief Iain Roy and team performance manager Pat Howard fly to South Africa, interview the squad, and Smith and Warner stand down from the captaincy for the remainder of the Test.
6. 6The Australian sanctionsOn 28 March Cricket Australia announces twelve month bans for Smith and Warner and nine months for Bancroft, with additional leadership bans for the two senior players.
7. 7The homecomingAll three are sent home and give separate press conferences on Australian soil, and coach Darren Lehmann announces his resignation on 29 March effective after the final Test.
8. 8The cultural reviewThe Ethics Centre delivers Australian Cricket a Matter of Balance in October 2018 with 42 recommendations, after which the chairman resigns and further board and executive changes follow.

A sequence of events reconstructed from contemporary reporting and Cricket Australia and ICC statements. Dates are as announced at the time and the steps describe the order of public events, not the internal investigation timeline.

Smith was still captain at the end of the day's play, and it was the press conference rather than the incident that turned a code of conduct matter into a crisis.

The press conference that made it worse

Smith and Bancroft sat down together at the close of play. Both admitted the act had been planned. Smith said the idea had come from what he called the leadership group, said he had known about it and let it go ahead, and said he would not be standing down as captain. Bancroft said the object had been sticky tape onto which he had collected granules from the pitch surface.

Two of those statements did not survive. The object was sandpaper, not tape, which Bancroft confirmed once he returned to Australia. And Smith did stand down, along with Warner, before play resumed the next morning, with wicketkeeper Tim Paine taking over for the remainder of the Test.

That is the hinge of the whole affair. A ball tampering charge is survivable. An admission from a Test captain that a plan had been made in advance, followed by an inaccurate description of the method, is not. Australian reaction over the following forty-eight hours was extraordinary in volume, including comment from the Prime Minister, and Cricket Australia was responding to that as much as to the offence.

What the Laws actually say about the ball

Law 41.3 governs the condition of the match ball. Players may polish it provided no artificial substance is used, may dry a wet ball with a towel, and may have mud removed under an umpire's supervision. Anything else — rubbing an artificial substance onto the ball, using any implement on it, lifting or picking at the seam — is prohibited.

The in-match penalty is deliberately modest. Umpires change the ball for one of comparable but appropriate wear chosen by the batting side, award five penalty runs to the batting side, and report the matter. Under the ICC's Code of Conduct the same act sits at Level 2, with a fine range and a small number of suspension points.

That scale exists because ball management sits on a spectrum. Shining on trousers is legal. Sweat is legal. Sugary saliva was an unresolved grey area for years before saliva was banned outright during the pandemic and the ban later relaxed. Players and boards from most Test nations have been sanctioned for crossing the line at some point. The Laws treat it as cheating of a technical kind, not as fraud.

The two sets of sanctions

Two entirely separate bodies punished the same incident under different rulebooks, which is why the numbers look so mismatched.

Person	Body	Sanction	Effect
Steve Smith	ICC	Two suspension points and 100 per cent match fee fine	Missed one Test
Steve Smith	Cricket Australia	12 month playing ban, 24 month leadership ban	Missed the 2018-19 home summer and the 2019 IPL start
David Warner	Cricket Australia	12 month playing ban, indefinite leadership ban	Leadership ban lifted December 2024
Cameron Bancroft	ICC	Three demerit points and 75 per cent match fee fine	No suspension
Cameron Bancroft	Cricket Australia	9 month playing ban	Available again from late December 2018
Darren Lehmann	None	Not charged	Resigned as head coach

The ICC charged what happened on the field. Smith was charged under Article 2.2.1, conduct of a serious nature contrary to the spirit of the game, for his knowledge of the plan. Bancroft was charged under Article 2.2.9, changing the condition of the ball. Neither charge reaches the ICC's most serious tier, and both players accepted the sanctions rather than contesting them.

Cricket Australia charged something broader. Its own Code of Conduct allowed it to consider the planning, the involvement of a junior player, the concealment and the effect on the game's standing in Australia, and its penalty range was not capped. Smith and Bancroft were charged with conduct contrary to the spirit of the game; Warner with developing the plan, instructing a junior player to carry it out and providing advice on how to do it.

• Playing ban
• Leadership restriction

Steve Smith1224

David Warner1278

Cameron Bancroft90

Playing bans are the Cricket Australia suspensions announced on 28 March 2018. The leadership figure for Warner is the elapsed time until his ban was lifted in December 2024, roughly 78 months, not a length that was ever specified when the sanction was imposed. Bancroft received no leadership sanction.

Show the numbers

Length of each sanction in months

Item	Playing ban	Leadership restriction
Steve Smith	12	24
David Warner	12	78
Cameron Bancroft	9	0

Why Australia went so much harder than the ICC

Three reasons, all of them stated at the time by Cricket Australia and all of them contested since.

The first is jurisdictional. The ICC polices matches. A national board polices the people who represent the country, and the harm Cricket Australia identified was to the standing of the sport in Australia rather than to the Newlands Test.

The second is the leadership element. Australia's captaincy is treated by its own governing body as a position with obligations beyond the toss, and the finding that the captain had known and allowed it to proceed was weighted heavily. The two year leadership ban on Smith was a separate penalty from the playing ban and ran concurrently for the first twelve months.

The third is public reaction, which nobody at Cricket Australia has ever quite denied. The Australian Cricketers' Association argued from the start that the penalties were disproportionate to the offence and asked for them to be reduced in late 2018. Cricket Australia declined. Several former players, including some who were unsparing about the act itself, have since said the twelve month figure was chosen for how it would read rather than for how it compared to precedent.

Darren Lehmann and the coaching change

Head coach Darren Lehmann was cleared by Cricket Australia's investigation of any knowledge of the plan. He initially said he would continue in the role. On 29 March, after watching the three players' press conferences from Australia, he announced he would resign at the end of the Johannesburg Test.

Justin Langer, then coaching Western Australia and the Perth Scorchers, was appointed to replace him in May 2018 across all three formats. His brief was explicitly cultural as well as technical, and his four year tenure — which included a home Twenty20 World Cup title in 2021 and an Ashes win, and ended with his resignation in February 2022 after a short contract extension offer — was shaped throughout by the fact that he had been hired to fix something.

Sponsors, broadcasters and money

Magellan Financial Group terminated its naming rights sponsorship of the men's home Test series within days. The three year deal had only begun ahead of the 2017-18 Ashes and was reported at around 20 million dollars in total. Asics ended its individual endorsement contracts with Warner and Bancroft. Sanitarium also withdrew.

The broadcast position was different and, from Cricket Australia's balance sheet, decisive. A new domestic rights agreement covering Test cricket, the Big Bash League and international limited overs cricket had been signed in the weeks before Newlands. It was not reopened. Whatever the reputational damage, the money underpinning the Australian game for the next six years was already locked in, which is one reason the crisis produced governance change rather than financial collapse.

The Longstaff review and what it found

Cricket Australia commissioned The Ethics Centre, whose executive director is the philosopher Dr Simon Longstaff, to conduct an independent review of the culture of Australian cricket. The report, Australian Cricket a Matter of Balance, ran to roughly 145 pages, carried 42 recommendations, and was released in October 2018 in a partially redacted form.

Its central finding was that Newlands was a symptom. The review described a governing body that was, in its own words, arrogant and controlling, and identified a set of shadow values operating beneath the published ones — command and control, only results matter, high performance is what we are here for, Australia needs us to win, individual first. It argued that the organisation had pursued winning with great effectiveness while leaving the ethical boundaries of that pursuit undefined, and had then been surprised when players tested them.

A second strand of work, a player led review chaired by former Test opener Rick McCosker with input from Tim Paine, Rachael Haynes, Pat Cummins, Shane Watson, George Bailey and Justin Langer, ran alongside it and produced the players' pact.

• 3Players sanctioned by Cricket Australia
• 42Recommendations in the Ethics Centre review
• 145Approximate pages in the report
• 5Senior departures within eight months

Counts of published outcomes rather than measurements of impact. The 42 figure is the number of recommendations in The Ethics Centre report. The senior departures figure counts the coach, chief executive, chairman, team performance manager and one board member who left within eight months.

The departures

Nobody was dismissed over Newlands. Everyone left anyway.

Chief executive James Sutherland announced in June 2018 that he would step down after seventeen years in the role, with Kevin Roberts taking over. Team performance manager Pat Howard, whose position had been under scrutiny well before Cape Town, departed. Chairman David Peever was re-elected at the October annual general meeting days before the review was published, then resigned within a week under pressure from the state associations. Former Test captain Mark Taylor, a director since 2004, resigned from the board shortly afterwards, saying the game needed to move on from anyone associated with the period.

Earl Eddings became chairman. Roberts himself left in 2020 during the pandemic, replaced by Nick Hockley. Within roughly two years the entire senior leadership of Australian cricket had turned over.

The players' pact and the code of conduct

The players' pact, unveiled by Tim Paine in October 2018, was a short public statement of the standard the men's teams committed to on the field. It addressed sledging directly, drawing a line between competing hard and personal abuse, and committed players to a described set of behaviours rather than to a slogan.

Cricket Australia also rewrote parts of its Code of Conduct over the following years. The change with the longest consequences came in 2022, when it created a formal pathway for any player or support person carrying a long term sanction to apply for a review — a route that had not existed when the 2018 penalties were imposed. It was written in general terms but everyone understood what it was for.

Serving the bans

The suspensions covered international cricket and cricket sanctioned by Cricket Australia, which meant the Sheffield Shield, the Big Bash and everything under a state association. They did not cover club cricket run at the association level, and they did not cover overseas competitions once the ICC's own recognition period had passed.

Steve Smith and David Warner both played Sydney grade cricket during the ban, which produced the unusual sight of large crowds at suburban Sydney ovals, and both appeared in the Global T20 Canada and Caribbean Premier League in mid-2018. Bancroft played league cricket in England and signed with Durham for 2019, where he was appointed county captain. All three returned to the Indian Premier League in 2019 once their suspensions expired.

The returns

Both twelve month bans expired in late March 2019, timed so that the players became available immediately before Australia's World Cup campaign in England. Both were selected.

Smith's return to Test cricket at Edgbaston in August 2019 produced 144 and 142, and he finished that Ashes with 774 runs from seven innings at an average above 110, having missed a Test after being struck on the neck by Jofra Archer at Lord's. It remains one of the highest series aggregates by an Australian in England. Warner had the opposite experience, dismissed repeatedly by Stuart Broad for a series total of 95, then answered it in the following home summer with 335 not out against Pakistan at Adelaide Oval.

Bancroft's international return was brief. He played two Tests in the 2019 Ashes, was dropped, and has since built a substantial first class career with Western Australia and in county cricket without adding to his Test caps. His story is the one least often told, and the one where the sanction's effect on a career was arguably largest.

Warner's leadership ban and how it ended

The indefinite leadership ban was the sanction that outlasted everything else. Warner could play but could not captain any Cricket Australia sanctioned side, including a Big Bash club.

The 2022 Code of Conduct amendment opened a review path. Warner applied in November that year while the Test side was playing the West Indies, then withdrew within a fortnight, objecting to a process he said would amount to a public trial and would drag his teammates back into it. Pat Cummins and several senior players said publicly at the time that a lifetime leadership ban was, in their view, the wrong outcome.

He applied again after retiring from international cricket. In December 2024 an independent Code of Conduct Commission panel found unanimously that he had satisfied the criteria, and the ban was lifted with immediate effect, six and a half years after it was imposed. He was named Sydney Thunder captain for that Big Bash season within days.

The questions that were never resolved

Cricket Australia's investigation was conducted in a matter of days, in South Africa, in the middle of a Test series. Integrity chief Iain Roy interviewed the squad and found only three people culpable. That speed has been the durable criticism of the whole exercise.

The most prominent challenge came in 2021, when Bancroft gave a newspaper interview in England whose phrasing was widely read as implying that Australia's bowlers understood what was happening to the ball. Cricket Australia's integrity unit contacted him. He confirmed he had nothing to add to his 2018 account. The bowlers of that era — Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon — issued a joint statement rejecting any suggestion they knew. No further charges have ever been laid, and no additional evidence has been made public.

There is also the review that was never released. Reporting in 2021 identified a separate Cricket Australia commissioned examination of the Newlands events that was not published, which has kept the question alive without answering it.

What actually changed on the field

The clearest change was verbal. Sledging as an organised Australian tactic was wound back under Tim Paine and then under Pat Cummins, and the shift was visible enough that opposition players commented on it. Whether it was a change of belief or a change of policy is not something a scoreboard can settle.

The second change was in who leads. Cummins became the first specialist fast bowler to hold the Australian Test captaincy for a sustained period since the 1950s, appointed in November 2021 after Paine's own resignation over an unrelated matter. Australia then won the 2021-22 Ashes at home, the Twenty20 World Cup, the World Test Championship final in 2023 and retained the Ashes in England in the same year — which is the strongest available evidence against the argument that the aggression of the previous era was what produced the results.

How Newlands sits in Australian memory

Eight years on, it functions in Australian sport the way a small number of events do: as a reference point that needs no explanation. Crowds in England chanted about sandpaper for years, and still occasionally do. The word sandpaper alone will carry the entire story in an Australian sports bulletin.

What it did not do was end careers in the way it looked like it would in the last days of March 2018. Smith returned to be one of the highest run scorers in Australian Test history and captained the side again as a stand-in. Warner retired from international cricket in January 2024 with a farewell Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground and had his leadership ban lifted within the year. The institution changed far more than the individuals did.

For the longer arc of how Australian cricket got to that point, the history of Australian cricket and the origins of the game here cover the century of habits and rivalries that produced the culture the review described. The customs on the other side of that culture — the songs, the caps, the dressing room rules — are set out in the guide to Australian cricket's rituals, and the technical business of surviving on Australian pitches is covered in the guide to back-foot batting technique.

Where to read the primary material

Three documents carry most of the weight. The ICC's own media release from 25 March 2018 sets out the charges, articles and penalties in a single page and is the only source for the exact ICC sanctions that does not go through a news outlet. The Ethics Centre published a case study summary of Australian Cricket a Matter of Balance alongside the report itself, and the report is the only place the shadow values language appears in its original form. Cricket Australia's December 2024 statement on the Code of Conduct Commission decision explains the review process that ended Warner's leadership ban.

For the events themselves, contemporary reporting from March 2018 is more reliable than later summaries, which have a tendency to compress the ICC and Cricket Australia penalties into a single set of numbers. They were never the same set. Anyone quoting a twelve month ban issued by the ICC has the story wrong.

More on the Australian game across formats and competitions is at the Australia hub, the cricket in Australia section, the Ashes guide and the cricket section. Career records for the players named here are indexed under players.