Leading Gunnedah cricket identities have joined the condemnation of the Australian Test side over the ball-tampering scandal, with long-serving NSW Country selection chairman Tim Grosser calling for the whole team to be sacked.
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Grosser, who played two matches for NSW in the late 1960s, believes that the whole team would have known about the act prior to it being implemented.
As such, he said every player should be sent home before the start of the fourth and final Test against South Africa in Johannesburg on Friday and then have their contracts torn up.
“Cancel their contracts, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “Let them start again. My argument has always been that they’re nothing but a mob of spoilt brats.”
Grosser described it as a “dark day” for Australian cricket. And he labelled the ball-tampering act – committed by junior team member Cameron Bancroft, with the backing of the team’s “leadership group” in the just-completed third Test at Cape Town – as “just stupidity”.
He said: “They’re saying, ‘I feel sorry for Bancroft’. But I don't feel sorry for him at all, because he could have said no. He’s a grown man and knows the consequences.”
Grosser said the Test stars, with their fat contracts, should be made to get a “real job”. “None of them have had a working job – they’ve been playing cricket since they were 16 years old,” he said.
Leading Albion player James Mack, secretary of the Gunnedah District Cricket Association, described the affair as “very strange” and a “bad look” for Australian cricket.
He called on those involve to be honest and open about what transpired so the “slate can be cleaned” and “everyone can move on”. For that to happen, he added, there would have to be “pretty severe consequences for everyone involved”.
But sacking players would be a “pretty tough call”, he said, adding that even if severe punishments were meted out, it would still take a “very long time” to move past the scandal.
Court House vice president and player Sam Doubleday, who is vice president of the juniors for the GDCA, said the Test stars involved in the incident should have known better. “It’s something that’s going to stick with those players for the rest of their lives,” he added.
He said that it was the worst offence committed by an Australian international cricketer in his lifetime.
But veteran Kookaburras batsman Cameron Milne believes that the matter has been amplified by social media to a level not in keeping with the offence. He doesn’t condone the action, but added: “Everyone ball-tampers … It’s been going on since day dot.”
