Shining blight

It is natural that we pray for a miracle at Easter in light of whats happening with Australian cricket at the moment.

Jesus died on the cross for our sins and was resurrected: but in South Africa the baggy green crucifixion has only just begun.

Guilty at the highest level on multiple cameras across multiple Twitter accounts of the dreaded C word.

I dont want to say cheating because the miracle we need is finding a plausible way to suggest we werent cheating at Cape Town during the fourth Test.

Im going to say we were guilty of confessing to cheating because hopefully that takes the focus off cheating, which it doesnt really. It only highlights how conflicted we are as a nation about ball shining and ball tampering, when we get caught.

Its a fine line, and not really a sin if you know not what you do? But we did, as Steve Smith confirmed.

Footage of the national coach on a walkie talkie relaying a message to someone way outside the leadership group to shove it down his trousers didnt bode well.

And then the team captain admiting it on global TV kind of sealed the deal.

To be fair, confessing was the decent thing to do after all the replays. But do we deserve decent from our national cricket captain when it leads to descent into sporting moral torpitude for your country? Discuss.

All politician knows the way you cling on to credibility, no matter how far fetched, is to deny the seemingly obvious.

Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman and Cameron Bancroft was not getting stickie with his dickie near the wickie playing crickie.

Spin should have overriden sin in this battle for reverse swing.

Save the brutal honesty for the dressing room where you only have to pay lip service to what you say you mean as you sledge the opposition up the stairwell.

Zip service should have been the directive in front of the cameras, no matter how farcical, because in the face of cricket history, surely alleged cheats is better than confessed. But there you have the conflict with what we think of ourselves and what the ICC adjudicates.

On the one hand we respect and expect our heroes do anything to extract an advantage over the opposition within the rules.

On the other hand, cheating isnt one of those things, technically, because its outside the rules.

On the third hand its not really cheating until you get caught, which we did. And even then its not really cheating until you admit it. Maybe.

So damn, were damned, for cricket eternity (even though everyone does it).

Its going to take a fair bit of data harvesting to change peoples opinion on this one.

And maybe that is one positive to come out of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal. Anything seems possible in the era of fake news. Even the idea that Aussies dont cheat.

As disillusioned cricket fans, lets pray that miracle gets a bit of traction soon and things start to reverse swing back our way.