After the ball-tampering incident rocked Australian cricket and the cricket fraternity, Ottis Gibson had his say on the issue. The relatively newly-appointed South African coach revealed his hopes of never having to face such scrutiny while he is the gaffer of the Proteas.

South Africa themselves are not clean in this regard. Faf du Plessis was caught rubbing the ball on his zip in 2013 and then using mint-coalesced saliva to shine the ball in 2016. Vernon Philander, too, was guilty of digging his thumb on the ball in 2014.

All of these incidents happened before Gibson took over the reins of the team as he added that he is not going to judge the Aussies for what they did and will instead try to play the game with respect to the rules and regulations and without crossing the “imaginary” line.

"Look, I would hope that it never happens under my watch," Gibson said. "I'm not going to sit here and say that we're whiter than white or anything, but we'll try and play the game within the rules of the game. We know where the rules are, and the imaginary line that we talked about for the whole series, we feel like we know where that is and we'll try not to cross the line."

Gibson also stated that every team tries to reverse the ball and use various techniques to get a shine on one side and rough on the other.

"Every team since the beginning of reverse swing, everybody tries to get the ball reversing," Gibson said. "They skim it in, they bounce it in, they try and get it rough. The spinner gets his hand in the dirt and rubs it on the ball. Everybody has a way of getting the ball to go a little bit further. Because the ball will reverse naturally and then everybody has a way of trying to get it going a little bit further."

He then went on to speak of the mentality of the Baggie Greens when it comes to playing cricket. Their win-at-all-costs mindset might have forced them to stoop so low and resort to using external means to tamper the ball into reverse-swinging.

Against England in the Ashes, Australia were never really behind and were dominating all throughout the series. In South Africa, however, the Aussies have been on the back-foot for much of the third Test and the desperation might have pushed them to use unethical means, believes the Proteas coach.

"The Aussies have said themselves that the brand of cricket they play is to win at all costs, and when you have that mindset... when you look at the Ashes, they were never really behind in many of the games. They won quite comfortably," Gibson said.

"Here they were behind a couple of times and perhaps that desperation came into it for them. It's a shame that something like this had to happen for them to have a look at themselves. We just leave that to them and we'll focus on winning the next game."

With the unfolding of the saga and the subsequent blast that it caused, the Australian team are very down. When asked about the mental frame of the Aussies, he said: “That's not my problem. We're trying to win the series so from our point of view we hope that they're very shattered."

What is hard to digest is the fact that despite having a great bowling attack, the Australian “leadership group” took to mess with the condition of the ball in order to have an upper hand on the Test. Ottis Gibson, meanwhile, stated that he is a fan of the Aussie bowling attack and praised Cummins in particular.  

"I'm still a huge fan of their bowling attack - they've got three six-foot-six fast bowlers bowling 140," Gibson said.

"I thought Pat Cummins was excellent in the last Test match, 24 years old, kept coming in all the time, got crucial wickets in both innings and then I see him running around the boundary diving around. So I'm still watching their bowlers and thinking, 'That's a very good bowling attack they've got.'"