Steve Smith Reflects on 2018 Cricket Scandal as Australia Returns to South Africa
Steve Smith still hears the click.
Six years on from the moment Australian cricket imploded in Cape Town, the former captain says the sound of a camera flash can still drag him straight back into the chaos of 2018 and the scandal that reshaped his life.
Australia are about to play their first Test series in South Africa since “sandpapergate”, the tour on which Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were sent home in disgrace. The team flies in chasing a series win; their senior batter arrives still carrying scars.
“I’m not a big fan of cameras, I get anxious around cameras,” Smith told News Corp in an interview published on Thursday. “That was a traumatic experience in my life and when I hear the flash of a camera it makes me revisit that, in a way.”
The series they return for begins in Durban on 9 October. The last one ended in humiliation.
Back in March 2018, Bancroft was caught on television rubbing the ball with sandpaper during South Africa’s second innings of the third Test. By the close of play he had admitted trying to alter the condition of the ball. Smith, then captain, conceded he knew about the plan.
The fallout was immediate and brutal. Cricket Australia stripped Smith of the captaincy and banned him for a year. Warner, his vice-captain, received the same sanction, while Bancroft was banned for nine months. Smith broke down in tears at Sydney airport as he apologised to the public, a broken figure under an unforgiving bank of cameras and microphones.
Australia’s then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said the affair had “bitterly disappointed the whole nation”. Smith became the face of that disappointment, hounded as he left Johannesburg and again when he landed in Sydney.
“The 24-48 hours after being told by James Sutherland that I was getting banned for a year, going through the airport in Johannesburg getting absolutely mobbed, and then flying back and doing that press conference… I still have little flashbacks here and there of it,” Smith said.
“I felt like I was kind of thrown to the wolves through [Johannesburg] airport. I didn’t have any support there at all.”
He was 28 then, the world’s premier Test batter and the leader of his country. Now 37, he speaks like a man who has replayed those days far too often.
“It was certainly a difficult period, particularly the initial few days after,” he said. “The mental state I was in was not great. That’s somewhere I’d like not to get to again, but I certainly learned from that and have been able to move forward with my life.”
Moving forward has taken time and selective amnesia.
“I’ve tried to kind of erase a lot of 2018 and what happened,” he admitted. “I can’t remember a lot about the series. I’ve tried to block most of it out of my memory bank.”
On the field, his response has been ruthless. Smith returned to the Test side in 2019 and quickly reasserted himself as one of the game’s elite batters, piling up runs in Ashes cauldrons and World Test Championship campaigns. After serving a two-year leadership ban, he was restored to the inner circle as Test vice-captain before the 2021-22 Ashes and has since stepped in as captain when Pat Cummins has been unavailable.
He has already been back to South Africa once, for a one-day series in 2020, and has walked into hostile arenas across England and beyond. The boos became a soundtrack; the response became part of his armour.
“It’s something I’m kind of used to,” Smith said. “I’ve copped a lot at times away from home, at different venues across my career, and it’s something that I take in my own stride. I use it as motivation to try and go out and do well, and try and take a positive from it.”
Now comes the full return: a three-Test series on South African soil, the first since the scandal, with Smith no longer the fallen captain but the senior pro, vice-captain, and still the prize wicket.
The cameras will be waiting again. So will the flash.
