He is sitting at the ABC radio studio on Sunday, gazing at the MCG arena in front of him, where the players are warming up before the start of the play. This is Jim Maxwell’s 51st year of commentating on the game, and he seems still excited about what the day will throw up. “It’s a game of many moods”. But the intent is to drag him through time at least to a couple of momentous episodes.
Not everything is funny, though. Like the 2018 sandpaper gate in South Africa that left a huge dent on the holy cow of Australian cricket. It happened in the third Test at Cape Town, but Maxwell was aghast at what went down in the first Test in Durban.
“Australia’s behaviour was outrageous in that Durban Test. I remember being on air and telling the audience that, ‘no need to talk here, let me just wind up the ‘effects’ microphone’ … the level of abuse aimed at Quinton de Kock from Nathan Lyon and Mitch Starc in particular was obnoxious. The umpires were deaf, really not doing anything. [Kumar Dharmasena and S Ravi were the officials]. They should have stepped in. So, all that was building up a bit of feeling between the two teams.”
But Maxwell had seen enough of the game over the years that he sensed that Australians were out of line, and about to enter into dangerous territory. He wrote to James Sutherland, the chief executive of Cricket Australia just after that Durban Test, before their ball-tampering shenanigans. “I emailed him that you need to be having a look and eye on the behaviour of this Australian team because something is going to go wrong. I didn’t necessarily think of ball-tampering, but more from the behavioural side of things.”
Then came the Kagiso Rabada incident, his collision with Steve Smith. “He got a one-match ban but that was overturned. It ramped up the feelings between the teams a notch. I remember Australia were a bit on the back foot in Cape Town; they were getting desperate to manufacture a wicket. They had a bad incident or two with Warner and de Kock in that infamous stairwell episode where Warner’s behaviour was well for everyone to see. Meanwhile, a couple of South African board officials had posed laughing with some fans wearing the mask of ‘Sonny Williams’- stupid silly thing to do,” Maxwell recounts.
The details of Williams and Warner’s wife Candice when she was younger and single aren’t worth here going into any detail; enough to say that the tabloid coverage of that episode had pushed Candice to a clifftop, thinking about suicide before her brother rushed to avert tragedy. “So that was all going on in that series, things just kept escalating,” says Maxwell, shaking his head six years later.
“Stupid, naive”
Maxwell remembers being on air that fateful morning with Mark Nicholas. “We had a little chat about Steve Smith as captain before everything blew up on the field. Mark was saying he was a very naive leader just the way he behaved with DRs as he would get it wrong all the time, being swept with emotions.”
Maxwell pauses, looks through the windowpane at the field, and wags the finger. “That day Smith went out after lunch and he saw Warner talking to Bancroft, giving him advice. That was his moment to intervene. He didn’t. Obviously, Warner knew he was a marked man by the SA television and they had shift the blame out there to Bancroft,” he says.
“The stupidity .. the blokes were done not for ball tampering but for dishonesty. Because they had created this bullshit at the press conference about what had happened. That was a lie. That’s why they got done,” he adds.
Maxwell remembers another development. “I remember the story was, in all the aftermath, that when the officials looked at the ball in the game there was no evidence of tampering happening! Australia, I feel, had pulled back their horns a bit because I presume they were told they were being watched. It was a horrible exercise of stupidity, naivety …”
Darren Lehmann saunters into the ABC radio box where we are sitting, says his hellos to Maxwell, who responds with a wisecrack and Lehmann picks up something with a laugh and exits the booth. The question blurts out, ‘“Jim, Lehmann was the coach in that sandpaper gate series…” and Maxwell smiles. “Darren was certainly a part of that whole ‘must win at all costs attitude’. He was the driver of that behaviour. He may not have been complicit in the tampering episode, but the overall behaviour of that team, he has to take his blame in that part at the very least.”
He anticipates the next question and turns to look in the eye, and says: “Son, remember as a journalist, you have to be aloof from the players to an extent. You get too close, you get burned. Emotions can colour you. I am fine with Darren now, since he has become a commentator but not then. The famous radio commentator Alan McGilvray, my senior, would say, ‘it will affect your judgement, don’t get too close Jim even if it seems tempting and all. Be careful’.”
Eden Miracle
We return to India and that Eden Gardens day in 2001 when Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman stunned the Aussies. “Oh, even as those two were batting on, I remember a TV falling off from the next cubicle, another commentary booth. It toppled over and fell into the stands! Unbelievable. Luckily that bit was untenanted. Phew. The show must go on and it went on!”
Maxwell remembers a dinner the night before Laxman-Dravid shook hands with history. “I had met an architect, who had incidentally done some work at the Eden Gardens, a friend of my academic mother, and he told me, ‘Jim, get ready for Australian loss. Indians are going to do it’ and I went, ‘whaaa? How? … whatever tea-leaves he was reading, he was spot on, eh?!”
India’s Virat Kohli barges into Australia’s Sam Konstas on Day 1 of the fourth Test between Australia and India at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. (Screengrab via X/@7Cricket)
The chat shifts to Kohli’s shoulder-barge incident with the teenaged debutant Sam Konstas. “I was talking to Sunny (Sunil Gavaskar) and nudging him about the incident at Lords in 1971. John Snow, the fast bowler, didn’t just tap him but ran him over! There was no official process but the England cricket board banned him for the next Test at Oval, and of course India won that game and the series. That was the punishment!” he says.
“I had said on air this about Kohli: that he should go on a holiday but I am not a lawyer and don’t understand level 1 and Pycroft, the match-ref, is a lawyer; they didn’t even have a hearing. The punishment didn’t fit the crime and maybe that’s what’s the prescribed thing to do but you have to ask the question: Is that kind of behaviour really acceptable?”
The chat winds down as it’s time for Jim to go on air, but he serves up another story as closure to that sandpaper gate scandal and Smith. “The funny thing is during their ban, both Smith and Warner came to play grade cricket in Sydney – Eastern Suburbs vs Sutherland. They were playing for Sutherland. Elections too were on then, a polling booth was near the ground. I asked Smith, ‘have you voted yet?’ And he replied that he shall after he gets out. He goes out to bat at No.3, Harry Conway is bowling and just as we have seen a couple of times this summer, it’s a ball on the leg side, flick, strangled down leg for nought! He comes back muttering and unhappy, and I couldn’t resist: ‘Steve, mate, you can go vote now!”
This is Jim Maxwell’s 51st year of commentating on the game. (Express Photo by Sriram Veera) 
India’s Virat Kohli barges into Australia’s Sam Konstas on Day 1 of the fourth Test between Australia and India at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. (Screengrab via X/@7Cricket)
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