Ex-Captain Who Ordered Underarm Ball 1981 Speaks on Newlands
A former player, captain, coach and commentator who says he ordered the underarm ball in 1981 has written about Newlands. He feels implicated by the review of Australian cricket's culture and calls for the 2018 trio to be allowed to earn their way back.
A former player, captain, coach and commentator who says he ordered the underarm ball in 1981 has written that the Newlands scandal left him feeling implicated. He set out his view in a first-person column published November 13, 2026.
The writer says he has thought about Newlands "more than I expected to". What stayed with him was not the footage but the feeling that Australian cricket had been walking towards something like it for a while.
Shame beyond the act
"I'm not writing as a bystander," he wrote. He says the shame of a mistake is rarely about the act alone. It comes from knowing you had the chance to be better and slipped up.
Steve Smith and David Warner were suspended for 12 months and Cameron Bancroft for nine, the column notes. Smith and Warner were also barred from leadership roles. The writer says they broke the rules and knew it, and that nobody should pretend otherwise.
He nonetheless could not watch the press conference and see only wrongdoing. He saw a captain who could not hold himself together and a young opener who looked as if he wished the floor would swallow him.
A culture that crept in
The writer points to Simon Longstaff's review, which found Cricket Australia and the national team had drifted into a culture where winning mattered more than almost anything. He says he read it and felt implicated, having been part of that world for most of his life.
"We admired the stare and the sledge and the refusal to give an inch, and we mistook ruthlessness for strength," he wrote. Nobody decided to build a culture that would produce Newlands, he argued. It crept in through decisions defended because they worked and lines crossed and forgotten because the team won.
He wishes more people had said much earlier that this was not who they wanted to be. Hard cricket and honest cricket, he wrote, are not opposites.
Living with one decision
The underarm, he says, still comes up at dinners, in interviews and in letters from strangers more than 45 years on. He says he is not after sympathy, because the call was his to own. It has shown him how long one moment can follow a person.
That is partly why the aftermath of Newlands sat badly with him. He accepts there was a fair argument that the bans were too harsh and a fair argument that they were not harsh enough. What troubled him was the appetite, which at times felt like "a hunger to watch someone fall".
Smith rebuilt his career through hard work and humility, he wrote. Bancroft has spoken honestly about what it did to him, and Warner spent years asking for his leadership ban to be reviewed. None escaped the consequences, he said, but a game that talks so much about character should hold two ideas at once: what happened was wrong, and people can earn their way back.
He also voiced empathy and admiration for Usman Khawaja for confronting the issue head on. Eight years on does not make it less significant, he wrote, and he rejected the suggestion that Khawaja is doing it to sell a book.
