by Trevor Chesterfield

What is all this hullaballoo about the application of some sticky substance on a ball to make it swing?
For those who think it hasn’t happened before Marcus Trescothick’s juicy dressingroom revelations believe in the tooth fairy. As he is trying to sell books to vindicate the issue, it is something which might do so.
Ball tampering though is as tired as any cliché of what takes place in the devious mind of a fast bowler or even captain.
Ninety year-old Sir Alec Bedser, so he tell us, used the natural talent he was given to swing the ball, often late. This had been to fool batsmen to who he was delivering that is was well-concealed half-volley only for the batsmen to edge a catch to the leg-slips. He learnt the leg-cutter trick on the hard Australian pitches of 1946-47.
Fanie de Villiers explains how he also learnt the art of leg-cutters on the hard, unsympathetic surfaces they had in England in the 1990 season when he played for Kent.
In between those years, and as discovered in my umpiring days, as well as from tales in the dressingroom once an editor put an end to what he called “your umpiring foolishness to concentrate your skills on writing about cricket” you get to learn about what type of artificial substances are used to get the ball to swing.
In one club match umpired on a broiling February Sunday in 1967 at a ground called Willowmoore Park, Benoni, South Africa, the captain of the fielding side complained to my co-umpire and I about the state of the ball. He was asking for a replacement. It was a mess, all right: only the softness of the leather and where it was coming apart with the inner seam had been caused by some oily substance, which we guessed (rightly it later turned out) with sunscreen.
As they had been responsible for getting the ball in this condition, they could continue using the same ball until it was due for a legitimate change. There were some fifteen overs to go and the complaints were voluble. You can bet that they didn’t try that trick again.
Legend has it how England spinner Derek Underwood, known during his days as Deadly, once tossed the ball back to his Kent county captain and asked him how he expected to bowl with a ball that had been tampered with by the team’s fast bowlers.
Australian greats Keith Miller and Ray Lindwall of the 1940s through to the 1960s suggested it went on when they wrote books late in their careers: from hair cream to sun lotion and as experienced sunscreen.
Umpires have pulled up bowlers for picking the seam, although Inzamam-ul-Huq went into a huff and refused to believe that his bowlers at The Oval would do such a thing. But Pakistan bowlers have been known since Lord’s 1992 to have infringed. Aaqib Javed had been cited in a book as one culprit.
As with the “we are not cheats” scenario, the ball disappeared from the umpires locker before it could be forensically tested for scuff marks.
Why, Mike Procter, when coach of South Africa on that historic three-match tour of India in November 1991, asked to see the ball at Eden Gardens (the call it The Eden in Kolkata) was alarmed at the scratch and scuff marks on the ball.
By the Gwalior game of that short sojourn, newspaper comments were emerging of Indian bowlers with extra long fingernails and there was a rupture in South African management relations between the team manager, Ali Bacher and United Cricket Board (of SA) president Geoff Dakin over comments made to the media.
These were seen to be a major faux pas on what had been essentially a highly politicised “Thank you, India” tour.
When notes to laws changed in1967 before the 1967/68 season, and done in a bid to get rid of the ball tampering curse, such simple acts as wiping sweat from the brow onto the hand, or sucking of sweets on the field, were banned. But it still continues.
It didn’t need Trestcothick to point it out: cheap publicity as a way of selling a book suggests that the Somerset and England opener was in on the “deal” from the start.
Yet, as Fanie de Villiers explained, sweat from under the arm pit is natural and more effective than anything else as it doesn’t mess up the quality of the leather whereas other artificial substances do.
Former Test umpire, Don Oslear, from England, has highlighted how in 1991 he cited the same (county) team in three separate reports for ball tampering. Nothing was done by the then Test and County Cricket Board.
To suggest that some administrators condone such acts explains how Trestcothick revealing such a cheap trick in ball tampering has been as much a part of the modern game as that from the 1940s, if not before. Maybe it is why Inzamam was able to sulk over accusations of ball tampering, knowing the umpire, Darrel Hair would cop the abuse and he wouldn’t.

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