New Delhi: Former Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja has dropped bombshell claims that the whole Australian team knew about the infamous sandpaper gate incident during the Cape Town Test in 2018 against South Africa.
Khawaja is set to detail his explosive claims in his autobiography ‘Sabr’ that will be published on Tuesday. However, three days before release, the former opener revealed what the book will say about the incident and that the whole team knew about the sandpaper on the ball in the Cape Town Test. Moreover, he also revealed that the object was used during the previous Test match as well.
“It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us,” Khawaja said, as quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald. “In an ideal world, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be the one who comes out and talks about the truth. The issue is that I genuinely thought after eight years the truth would have been out by now.”
Until now, the public narrative of the incident was that the then captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were involved in the incident, with Bancroft having applied the object to the ball. Smith and Warner were handed a one-year ban from playing in international and domestic cricket while Bancroft was banned for nine months.
Moreover, Smith was told that he could not captain Australia for two years. Warner was hit with a lifetime leadership ban in international and Australian domestic cricket, something which was overturned in 2024.
“Maybe I thought Davey would have exposed it, or someone else would have talked about it more. I just didn’t think it was going to come down to this. But the longer it’s gone on for, and right from the very start, I’ve been on the train of collectively taking it.
“Even in the change rooms, when I was talking to them after the game. I said, ‘Take this as a team’. We did this as a team. We knew what was going on, and we have to take it as a team, and so I was always of that stance,” he added.
He added that the likes of Smith, Bancroft and Warner have been criticised up until now for that act and that the incident led to long-lasting scars on them. “Obviously, it didn’t work that way, and those three guys got crucified.
“I’ve seen Davey over the last eight years just get nailed bad over and over again, and it’s taken a big man not to say anything and just to stay quiet.
“And he’s just copped it, and he’s copped it, and he’s copped it. And then ‘Bangers’ (Bancroft) in the same note, particularly, he played a little bit of Test cricket after that, but then never came back in, even though he’s been scoring a lot of runs. He’s been a terrific cricketer for a long time, but I know it’s something that hangs over his head.
“Even Steve Smith. Steve’s lucky, the greatest batsman of my generation. He came back from that, and he’s come back as good as he ever was in that first Ashes series, and it’s kind of been forgotten for him in some respects. But I know he has never ever forgotten that year and how it all panned out.”
Khawaja said that he was with Bancroft in the dressing room throughout the match and was never interviewed by Cricket Australia on the incident.
“I was sitting next to Cam Bancroft that whole Test match, and I didn’t get interviewed,” Khawaja said. “I thoroughly feel that I didn’t get interviewed because of that, because they knew that I wanted to take it as a team, because they knew I was ready to tell the truth if I was interviewed.
“And I was waiting for my phone to ring. It just never rang, and then the penalties were given, and I couldn’t believe it.”
In 2021, Bancroft had stated that it was “self-explanatory” that the bowlers had awareness of the incident in Cape Town, which led to Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon releasing a joint statement denying having any knowledge of the same.
Khawaja also claimed that the South African team was “far better” at working with the ball and that they were “trying to keep up with them”. He further said that he would reveal what they were doing in his book. Meanwhile, then South Africa captain Faf du Plessis has stated multiple times that his team was also trying to get the ball to reverse through unconventional methods, and he had previously been sanctioned twice for ball tampering.
