It was such a press conference that many couldn't help but sympathise with the Australian Captain, but Steve Smith's emotional outpouring, after being found guilty of the mistake in the ball-tampering incident that took place in South Africa this year, has not gone well personally with his teammate Mitchell Starc.
According to The Australian. Starc who was speaking at ‘Women in Banking and Financing’ forum in Sydney, echoed corporate adviser Sue Cato’s warnings against "‘ill-advised, ill-prepared" press conferences.
He said, “Going back to what Sue said before about being up front and tackling a problem head-on, that’s something the group who decided to go into a press conference didn’t really think about. They obviously didn’t see how big the reaction was going to be at that time and then went down the path of not telling the whole truth and then I guess involving another group, which ruined — well, not ruined — but affected other reputations,”
What angered the left arm fast bowler was his perception of being indirectly named in the incident, too. The Cricket Australia, for this reason as well, specified that there are only three players actually involved.
Josh Hazlewood, who is an innate part of Australia's fast bowling line up and was part of the "leadership group" in South Africa, also talked about the whole incident recently to Fox Sports. He said, “We obviously have ball maintenance people in the team, usually batsmen because they are in the circle and the bowlers field at fine leg. They look after the ball from time to time and if it stops swinging, normally it starts to reverse swing. We pretty much get it at the top of our mark one second before we start running in. We have a quick look to see which side of the ball is more worn than the other,”
Hazlewood expressed disappointment over what happened, particularly to the three players. “It was pretty emotional afterwards, probably more so the next morning after the news hit Australia and we woke up in South Africa. Obviously, Steve and Dave stepped down that morning. It was tough to be out there actually, I feel for the three of them. Especially Steve. Being the skipper, he had to take the full brunt. I’ve spoken with him a fair bit since and he seems to be doing better every day,”
(Inputs from Hindustan Times)
