“We initially just saw that he had something in his hand and he put it in his pocket, but we didn’t know what it was,” Alvin Naicker, head of production at SuperSport told Reuters. “It was only when he later panicked and put it in his underpants that we got sight of the yellow tape.”
After the broadcaster showed the images of Bancroft’s actions on the big screen at the ground, umpires Nigel Llong and Richard Illingworth called the player over. He produced a black piece of cloth used to clean sunglasses from his pocket and the umpires were, at the time, satisfied.
Naicker believes that had Bancroft kept the piece of yellow tape in his pocket and still produced the black cloth for the umpires, giving him the opportunity to dispose of the tape later, nobody would be the wiser.
“The moment he tried to dispose of it in his pants, we knew that this was a major incident. Until then, we were not sure what we were looking at.”
Naicker says they broadcast the footage of him rubbing the ball with the then unknown object almost immediately after the incident. “He [Bancroft] probably saw it two minutes after it happened and very smartly our cameraman focused on the coaching staff and we saw the coach [Darren Lehmann] get on the walkie-talkie to the player down on the field [Peter Handscomb], who ran on to speak with Bancroft. It was then he panicked.”
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/li...s-updates-live
