Pat Cummins, the right-arm fast bowler for Australia, has come out and stated that recently held Ball-Tampering incident that took place during the country's Test tour of South Africa, hit everyone in the Australian dressing room hard. The trio of Steve Smith, David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft were banned by Cricket Australia subsequently after their involvement in the ill-choiced mistake was proven.
Pat Cummins who is recovering from his injury that kept him out of the Indian Premier League, recently gave an insight into his experience of the incident to Cricket.com.au.
He said, "I remember seeing what happened up on the big screen and just getting a sick feeling in my stomach and just thought, 'Oh no, what's going on here? What's going to happen?', at the time, I thought this event that's just happened, it does have precedent around the world, it has happened a few times before. Never in Australia, but you kind of know what happens – an ICC sanction gets handed down."
He further added, "We'll worry about it after the game, just get through today" as they battled in a pivotal third Test with the series tied 1-1. The Cape Town Test was really good the first two days, It was good, hard cricket and it was a pretty even contest. It's a great ground, Newlands. The pitch was good, it felt like a really good game. Then from day three onwards, it was such a different match."
Cummins was one of the positives from the tour where Australia lost its first Test series away from home against South Africa since the rainbow nation's readmission into the sport but he was disturbed by the enormity of the ball-tampering issue.
He said, "You know it's big news but don't really know the magnitude," Cummins said. "Then the next morning when I woke up and checked my phone, that's when it hit me. That's when the reaction was unprecedented. We'd never seen anything like it before. It really took us out of the bubble about being on tour mean, we had the Prime Minister on the news giving his opinion on the situation, and ex-players and politicians, movie stars, and everyone"
"We just thought, 'Hang on, we're just cricketers playing a little cricket game over here in Cape Town' and suddenly this has just blown up all around the world. Suddenly everyone at home, who's maybe not even following the cricket or mates who don't watch that much cricket, are checking in going, 'Mate, hope you're OK'.That's when the magnitude hit me and from there I just remember a really awful week ... just a really tough week, especially on the three guys that put their hand up. I really felt for them and everyone trying to look after each other for that week, it was a pretty dark place."
