Ex-Australia Star Confesses To Sandpaper Use After Usman Khawaja's Bombshell

Stuart MacGill has admitted to using sandpaper during his playing days.© X (Twitter)

Former Australia leg-spinner Stuart MacGill, widely regarded as the late great Shane Warne's understudy, has admitted to using sandpaper during his playing days. MacGill, who played 44 Tests and three ODIs for Australia between 1998 and 2008, made the revelation after former Australia batter Usman Khawaja reopened the 'Sandpapergate' controversy in his memoir 'Sabr'. While Khawaja's revelations have rocked Australian cricket once again, eight years after the incident, MacGill's confession has further raised questions over Cricket Australia's findings.

Contrary to Khawaja's claims, Cricket Australia has maintained that the wider Australian team was not aware of the plan to use sandpaper to alter the condition of the ball during the Cape Town Test against South Africa in 2018.

Speaking to former Sydney Sixers teammates Steve O'Keefe and Moises Henriques on a FanaticsTV YouTube show, MacGill conceded that he had tampered with the ball in his playing days, but said it happened at a time when the use of sandpaper was not viewed as a "global cheating scam."

"I'd cut a small piece of sandpaper and tape it to my thumb," he said. "It was not a part of a massive 'global cheating scam'; I was just really curious to see what would happen and if it would work. And oh, it works (laughs)," said MacGill.

MacGill further elaborated on how he would attach a piece of sandpaper to his thumb and "scratch the living daylights out of it" before discarding it in a gutter.

"What they would do is the umpires as you're walking out on the ground, they used to put the ball sort of about 20 metres over the boundary and leave it there and you'd run out on the field, pick it up and go on the field. I would tape a little bit of a square of sandpaper on my thumb, pick the ball up just after tea, scratch the living daylights out of it, pull the sandpaper off, chuck it in the gutter before a ball had even been bowled. So nobody even knew that I'd done it, apart from all the scratches on the ball," he added.

Darren Lehmann, who was Australia's head coach during the 2018 tour of South Africa, has categorically denied being aware of the plan to use sandpaper. Players such as Mitchell Starc have also publicly denied any involvement in the scandal.

Former Australia captain David Warner, one of the three players sanctioned over the incident, has openly backed Khawaja and insisted that the claims made in his autobiography are true.

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