The Sandpaper series was radioactive from the start. Then a USB stick was delivered to my room

October 6, 2026 — 5:22am

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Sixteen days before Cameron Bancroft was caught hiding a piece of sandpaper down his pants, someone knocked on the door of my hotel room in Port Elizabeth, where the second Test between Australia and South Africa was about to begin.

It was about lunchtime, but I hadn’t ordered any food, and the housekeeping staff had already been around that morning.

Instead, as I got up and answered the door, I realised it was a delivery of another kind – a USB stick.

For a sports journalist covering cricket, this was not a common occurrence.

But a spiteful first Test in Durban in the preceding days had already given the impression this was not going to be your average tour.

On the thumb drive, as I discovered when I plugged it into my laptop, was unseen footage of an incident that had lit up the series just as it had begun – a stairwell clash between David Warner and South Africa wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock.

In a contest that was already brimming with tension, the clip showed the altercation from a different camera angle than the earlier leak to South African media and made for a fresh round of headlines.

I wasn’t to know that by the next leg of the tour in Cape Town, the vision would be rendered a footnote to one of cricket’s most infamous episodes.

Whenever I’m asked about reporting on the ball-tampering scandal of 2018 for the Herald and The Age in South Africa, I always remind people that Australia’s series there that year was already radioactive before it exploded at Newlands.

The days and weeks that followed the Australian team’s self-destruction on day three of the third Test were chaotic as Warner, Bancroft and captain Steve Smith were sent home.

In a piece in the hours after Bancroft was exposed, I said that the Cape Town affair was the biggest captaincy crisis since Greg Chappell told his brother Trevor to bowl underarm.

As it turned out, that was underplaying it spectacularly.

Newlands was the setting for Australian cricket to tip over the edge. The result was a reckoning for the national team, and the game.

Writing about it was an assignment like no other.

On my first night in South Africa, I was sipping a pint of Castle Lager at a hotel bar in Durban and heard that Australia wanted to have the stump microphones turned down when they were in the field.

The inference was obvious – the tourists didn’t want their on-field utterances towards the South Africans to be picked up by the viewing public as they tended to be when playing in the country, where the dial was usually kept up.

The request to Supersport, the South African network that televised the series and eventually zeroed in on Bancroft in Cape Town, was ignored.

Some in the Australian camp would later come to believe the broadcaster was weaponised against them in following the ball around as they fielded – to an ultimately devastating effect.

In Durban, Australia’s initial reaction to the stump microphones being left on was light-hearted. With some impromptu ambush marketing, they used the opportunity to........

© The Age