Cape Town: Something enduring about the cricket grounds in South Africa is they tend to be little changed from previous visits.
So there is a distinctly eerie feeling about returning to Newlands for the first time since the infamous 2018 “sandpaper-gate” Test match. Some typical early cloud obscures Table Mountain on the morning I arrive, but the cricket ground itself is much more open a few days out from the third Test, before either team has arrived to practice.
That means when I walk in at the Kelvin Grove End, most doors are open. I wander through the Western Province Cricket Club stand and out onto the field. A few metres to my left is the gate leading up to the visitors dressing room, and I follow it curiously.
The steps adorned with fake grass had their own moment of infamy in 2018, when David Warner walked up them after his first innings dismissal by Kagiso Rabada, accompanied to one side by the guest of a WPCC member who abused him all the way – that person would later be ejected from the ground.
That enclosure and its red seats are also where the travelling media sat to interview Steve Smith before the game. Tellingly, he spoke of a state of mental exhaustion.
“I didn’t feel I was hitting the ball that well [during the home summer], but my mind was in a good place,” Smith had said. “Maybe now my mind is not in as good a space as it was, but I feel now I am hitting the ball better.”
Once I get to the top of those stairs, more steps lead to the Australian dressing room, where so many fateful events took place eight years ago.
The door is opposite the team viewing area, a small box perched between the two stands, where cameras picked up then-coach Darren Lehmann using a walkie-talkie to communicate with the team via squad member Pete Handscomb, after the Newlands big screen had shown something was up with Bancroft. In 2014, it was the place where Shane Warne took a few daytime naps during an all-too-brief spell as part of the team coaching staff.
Something the players had said about these rooms is that they are cramped. There’s not enough acreage in the main dressing room for the whole side and support staff to congregate, so two smaller rooms are often used for other players and staff. As Tim Paine wrote in his autobiography:
“The Cape Town change room is divided by the shower and toilet block and players have to split up either side. The coaches are in another room. You are literally a team divided. Something can happen in one room and the people in the other two would have no idea.”
The Cricket Australia investigation of events in these rooms concluded that: “Prior knowledge of the incident was confined to three players, Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft”.
After play, the main dressing room saw plenty of discussions among the team about what should happen next. Reportedly, this was where Usman Khawaja made a case for collective responsibility about what had taken place.
The smallness of the rooms also means the corridor outside them became an impromptu meeting place. I walk along that corridor conscious that these are the places where Steve Smith chose, with Bancroft, to walk over to the media centre and take part in a press conference that played a major role in seeing them both banned from the game. Countless other discussions no doubt took place, and from seeing the space (or lack thereof), I get a sense of how it was possible for some to know more than others that infamous day.
Since 2018, there has been some renovation of the area. The shower and toilet room next to the main dressing room is new and roomier than its predecessor.
There's also a small dining room in the area, before the corridor leads out to the back entrance. It's here that I find the local security man, who kindly but firmly escorts me out and back down the stairs, past the signs outlining the players, support staff and match officials who will be permitted in the area during the game.
After that, I walk around the Newlands concourse towards the media centre, which offers similar views to the “clock radio” press box at Lord’s. A new corporate and office space was built alongside it a couple of years ago, and beneath the building is a small cricket shop. The shop assistant and I share a joke about how much sandpaper he sells, before he tells me that the pitch for this week won’t be as grassy or seam friendly as those in Durban and especially Gqeberha.
Then it’s up to the media centre, which in 2018 also served as the press conference room for Smith and Bancroft. It’s had a considerable glow-up since then, doubling as a corporate events space, but it is still possible to remember how it all looked and felt in those heavy hours when Australian cricket lurched into crisis.
Australia are staying well away from the Cullinan Hotel near Cape Town's waterfront, their base in 2018. But for Smith, captain Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Nathan Lyon and other members of the travelling group who were present eight years ago, it will be an odd experience at times to walk that same corridor and sit in those same rooms in a Test match.
It should also be a moment to realise how far they have come, and how much more perspective exists in the current side. Unquestionably, there is pressure on this week to perform, exacerbated by the sheer scale of the team's defeat at St George's Park.
Whatever happens, the Australian Test team is highly unlikely to lose its moorings in quite the same way. Nor, one suspects, will the Newlands crowd . The ghosts of 2018 might be a little more vocal.
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