(CRICBUZZ)The scars of the ball tampering episode from the Newlands Test earlier this year are still fresh in every Australian's mind and while the team goes through a cultural review and under new coach Justin Langer, tries to conduct itself differently on the field, there will still be questions asked of the team occasionally and that would lead to self introspection. Josh Hazlewood, currently out of England ODIs owing to a back trouble, believes that a win at all costs mentality led Australia to resort to what they eventually did - use sandpaper to shine the ball.
The pacer also mentioned how the Australian players were always rated based on their performance on the cricket field and that there was no other yardstick. However, he feels that has already started to change in Langer's brief regime so far. "It's a big tour always South Africa, coming off the back of an Ashes as well which was quite stressful," Hazlewood told News Corp. "All big tours are stressful and that added pressure we probably put on ourselves as much as anyone to win.
"Where the stress has come from is that we are pretty much measured on our cricket ability, not as people off the field, which we had probably got away from in the past six months, 12 months. A focus only on results I guess drives people to do different things and we are only measured on our cricket success," Hazlewood conceded.
"I don't think that's how it is now, I think that's changed a little bit, JL has talked a lot about how we are behaving off the field and we are going to be measured on that as well which is a good sign."
Hazlewood also believes that cricketers these days have little exposure to life outside cricket and that in many ways has stunted their holistic growth and decision making skills. Talking of Steve Smith, Hazlewood opined that perhaps the suspended skipper was completely ready with his cricket at the top job, but not quite otherwise with all that that came along with the job - pressures, criticism, etc. "Cricket-wise I think he was ready, he probably wasn't ready with everything that came with it I guess," Hazlewood noted. "It's a different time now where we're basically cricketers from the time we leave school and we don't really experience life outside of cricket and the cricket environment, back in those times they probably got out in the world, had a few jobs, learned a lot of life lessons. Now you go straight from school into a cricket environment and cricket is all you know."
Ball tampering charges have existed in cricket since times immemorial and although the Newlands fiasco was damaging on many fronts - both in the way it was conducted and then handled - Hazlewood reveals to have been surprised how things snowballed into what it eventually did on the next morning after the press conference Smith and Cameron Bancroft attended. The enormity of the episode only hit the team when they got out of their beds the next morning, he confesses.
"We went to bed that night and Australia hadn't woken up yet, when it hit back in Australia and we woke up it was quite surprising how big a reaction it was. It wasn't massive in South Africa, all the Australian writers know it's going on here and there and around different teams and people have been done in the past, I guess they talked it down a bit if anything but once it hit home the media went the other way and the reaction was massive."
In the aftermath of the event, ICC first banned Smith for one Test and fined him 100 per cent of his match fees. However, following the furore and implications the whole 'act' could have, Cricket Australia launched an investigation, after which it banned Smith and David Warner - the instigator-in-chief - for 12 months from all forms of international and state cricket, while also banning Bancroft for nine months.