NEW DELHI: Absence of stringent punishment for ball-tampering encouraged players to cross the line, says former Australia captain Steve Waugh, blaming the authorities for the ‘Sandpapergate’ controversy that led to the suspension of Steve Smith and David Warner.

Smith and Warner were slapped with a one-year international ban while Cameron Bancroft was suspended for nine months by Cricket Australia in March this year for their role in the ball-tampering scandal in South Africa.
“You know they push the boundaries a bit by throwing the ball into the rough on the ground, which they shouldn’t do and then it’s escalated from there. It’s a shame how it got to the point that it did but I guess the authorities let that happen,” Waugh told ESPNcricinfo at a Laureus event in Paris.

“There have been captains in the past who have been hauled up for tampering with the ball but the penalties have been very lenient; so there was no penalty for doing something wrong and it was always going to get to the case where it got out of control.”   
Waugh said Australia’s internal system was such that the players had lost touch with reality, thinking they are larger than the sport.

 “They are in a bit of a bubble and they are protected, you know they are insulated from a lot of things,” Waugh said. “They’ve got a lot of people around the side that protect them and tell them how good they are and how everything’s fantastic and sometimes you can lose touch with reality and I think that was best summed up when Steve Smith said that ‘we won’t make that same mistake again and we’ll just get on with it’.”