Cricket Australia must get to the bottom of what happened in South Africa

The smell that has wafted around Cricket Australia’s brusque response to cheating by the Australian team in South Africa eight years ago has redeveloped into a strong stench blanketing officialdom’s claim that the matter is closed.

Cricket Australian offered up three sacrificial lambs after Cameron Bancroft was filmed shoving sandpaper into his pants. Bancroft was banned for nine months. Skipper Steve Smith and batsman Dave Warner received 12-month suspensions. Smith was banned also from the captaincy for at least two years, while Warner was told he would never lead Australia.

One of Australia’s players in that Cape Town Test, Usman Khawaja, who retired last January, has written an autobiography, Sabr, in which he claims the entire team knew of tampering with the ball in the previous Port Elizabeth Test. “It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us,” Khawaja told the Herald.

Warner has come out and said Kawaaja’s recollection was 100 per cent accurate.“Now everyone knows the truth. It’s out there. People wanted to know it. You’ve come out and said it.”

Mitchell Starc is the first current player to deny the allegations, saying his recollection hadn’t changed over time and his fellow bowlers knew nothing about the sandpaper use. In 2021, when the controversy re-erupted, four of the Australian bowlers in Cape Town Test, Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitch Starc and Nathan Lyon, released a statement re-affirming that they did not know a “foreign substance was taken onto the field to alter the condition of the ball” until they saw images of the sandpaper in Bancroft’s possession on the big screen at the ground.

The sport personifies ethics and fair play; the official rulebook includes a preamble called the “Spirit of Cricket”. However, there has long been tension between the romanticised ideal and the pressure of professionalism.

The 1932-33 “Bodyline” series shocked Australia when England bowled lethal bouncers, and a 1981 one-day international turned into national shame after Australian captain Greg Chappell instructed his younger brother, Trevor, to roll the final delivery underarm to prevent New Zealand from hitting a six to win the match.

The same infamy haunts Sandpapergate.

Simon Longstaff, who led a review into the culture of Cricket Australia in 2018, said he had heard whispers that the public record of the cheating scandal was inaccurate and a cover-up was possible. “All I can say is that if what Khawaja alleges turns out to be true, then I was also lied to,” Longstaff wrote in the Australian Financial Review.

Khawaja has pulled out of promotional media interviews after being challenged to comment on other players’ reactions to his claims.

Cricket Australia has ruled out reopening an investigation into Sandpapergate.

It is a predictable self-protection ignoring the uncomfortable reality that five players who played in South Africa are expected to feature in the Test squad to play New Zealand this summer and the likelihood the scandal will fester for years as others release their own biographies.

Cricket Australia needs to recognise that their sport personifies ethics and fair play, both on the field and the boardroom. It needs to get to the bottom of what happened in South Africa once and for all, for the good of the game.

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