Steve Smith Reflects on the Scars of Sandpapergate

Steve Smith still hears it.

Not the jeers from hostile crowds, not the barbs from pundits. The click and crack of camera shutters. The soundtrack of the worst days of his career.

As Australia prepare for their first Test series in South Africa since the 2018 ball-tampering scandal, their former captain admits the scars from “sandpapergate” have never really faded.

Flashbacks from Johannesburg

“I’m not a big fan of cameras, I get anxious around cameras,” Smith said in an interview with News Corp 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 Australia are about to start in Durban is their first Test tour here since the implosion in Cape Town six years ago, when Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera rubbing the ball with sandpaper during South Africa’s second innings of the third Test.

Bancroft’s on-field actions detonated into a global scandal. By the close of play he had admitted trying to alter the condition of the ball. Soon after, Smith, then captain, publicly acknowledged he knew of the plan.

What followed broke a team, and nearly broke its leader.

Smith was stripped of the captaincy, banned for a year by Cricket Australia and marched in front of the world’s cameras at Sydney airport, where he broke down in tears as he apologised. David Warner, his vice-captain, received the same 12-month suspension. Bancroft was banned for nine months.

Australia’s then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said the affair had “bitterly disappointed the whole nation”. Smith carried that weight from the moment he left Johannesburg.

“Thrown to the wolves”

“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. He is 37 now, with almost a decade of cricket and a lifetime of perspective between those two numbers. The images of him sobbing into a microphone remain some of the most confronting in modern Australian sport.

“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.”

Move forward he did. When the ban ended in 2019, Smith walked straight back into the Australia side and almost immediately reasserted himself as one of the finest batters in world cricket. The runs came again. The noise never really stopped.

Erasing 2018, living with the rest

“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.”

He has returned to South Africa since, for a one-day series in 2020. He has faced baying crowds in England across multiple Ashes tours, with chants and taunts that rarely miss their target. The hostility has become a constant companion.

“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.”

The leadership exile ended too. After serving a two-year leadership ban, Smith was named Australia’s Test vice-captain ahead of the 2021-22 Ashes and has stood in as captain when Pat Cummins has been unavailable. The trust, at least within the dressing room and the national set-up, has been rebuilt.

Yet the mental imprint of those days in 2018 refuses to fully lift. The cameras still trigger something. The memory of walking through that Johannesburg airport, feeling abandoned and exposed, still bites.

Australia will open their three-Test series in South Africa in Durban on 9 October. For most of the squad, it is another chapter in a packed calendar. For Smith, it is another walk back into the country where everything fell apart — and where he proved, in the years since, that he could piece his career back together, even if some of the internal damage never quite heals.