Fanie de Villiers, the man who tipped off TV crew about ball tampering
On Monday, during a radio interview, de Villiers revealed how he instructed TV camera operators to keep their lenses trained on the Australians for ball tampering on Saturday, having suspected that they were upto something suspicious.
"I said earlier on, that if they could get reverse swing in the 26th, 27th, 28th over then they are doing something different from what everyone else does," the 53-year-old told RSN Radio. "We actually said to our cameramen, 'go out [and] have a look, boys. They're using something.' They searched for an hour and a half until they saw something and then they started following Bancroft and they actually caught him out at the end.
"It's impossible for the ball to get altered like that on cricket wickets where we knew there was grass on, not a Pakistani wicket where there's cracks every centimetre," added de Villiers, who played 83 ODIs and 18 Test matches. "We're talking about a grass-covered wicket where you have to do something else to alter the shape, to alter the roughness of the ball on the one side. You have to get the one side wetter, heavier than the other side."
According to de Villiers, the Australian cricket team could not have achieved reverse swing so early in the third Test without altering the shape of the ball. "Australian teams getting reverse swing before the 30th over, they had to do something. If you use a cricket ball and scratch it against a normal iron or steel gate or anything, anything steel on it, it reverse swings immediately. That's the kind of extra alteration you need to do," said the man who famously bowled South Africa to victory at the SCG in 1993-94.