“There’s no doubt there’s a growing momentum around Steve Smith being a potential captain, no doubt about that.”
Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and spinner Nathan Lyon, who had been all a part of the group in the course of the ill-fated collection, just lately issued a joint assertion, calling for an finish to “rumour-mongering and innuendo” relating to that episode.
Taylor, too, threw his weight behind the Australian bowling quartet.
“The bleeding obvious to me is they didn’t know that it had been doctored. You only have to read what they said during the week,” Taylor stated.
“If I could just read it out: ‘We did not know a foreign substance was taken on to the field to alter the condition of the ball’. And as they said, the two umpires in the game did not change the ball.
“So there was an attempt to change the condition of the ball but they didn’t get to do it. The umpire said, ‘That ball’s still fine, let’s get on with it’. So they did not know.”
Former Australian skipper Michael Clarke had criticised Cricket Australia (CA) for not probing the difficulty and “sweeping it under the carpet”.
Taylor, nevertheless, defended the probe given the circumstances.
“The question about whether Cricket Australia did enough three years ago, the answer to that is yes,” Taylor stated.
“I think we had a four-day window between the end of the Cape Town Test and the start of the fourth Test which was at Johannesburg, to send someone over, do an investigation, make a report and then make some decisions around that. That was obviously to send the three players home and to deal with it then.
“Yes, in an absolute ideal situation, of course not; it would have been great to have six months to do all this. But we had a four-day window and I think in that time, we got it right.”
Taylor additionally stated that releasing the investigation report wouldn’t assist issues.
“It’s going to be part of the cricket folk history, part of the history you don’t want cricket to be known for, it will be there forever.”
