{"id":72718,"date":"2018-12-24T01:03:15","date_gmt":"2018-12-24T00:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/2018\/12\/24\/flashpoints-of-2018-sandpaper-fiasco-forces-australia-to-atone\/"},"modified":"2018-12-24T01:03:15","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T00:03:15","slug":"flashpoints-of-2018-sandpaper-fiasco-forces-australia-to-atone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/?p=72718","title":{"rendered":"Flashpoints of 2018: sandpaper fiasco forces Australia to atone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ball-tampering in Cape Town led to sacking of captain Steve Smith and two other players and a softening of macho cultureTo some, scratching a cricket ball would be innocuous rather than infamous. But when the Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft did it during a Test match in Cape Town, the cricket world lit up. At the height of a viciously tempered series he used bright yellow sandpaper to rough up the leather in an attempt to aid his bowlers. Ball-tampering is a fact of cricket, but no international player had been caught so blatantly, using a foreign object smuggled on to the field. This time the offence was caught in lush high-definition by South African television. Related: Steve Smith&#8217;s media re-emergence is PR but his humility is genuine Continue reading&#8230;<br \/>\nVia: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sport\/blog\/2018\/dec\/24\/cricket-australia-ball-tampering-steve-smith-sandpaper\" target=\"_blank\">Flashpoints of 2018: sandpaper fiasco forces Australia to atone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ball-tampering in Cape Town led to sacking of captain Steve Smith and two other players and a softening of macho cultureTo some, scratching a cricket ball would be innocuous rather than infamous. But when the Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft did it during a Test match in Cape Town, the cricket [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}