A cricketing drama to divide a nation: why the sandpaper scandal is Australia’s Bazball | Barney Ronay

Any plans for the weekend? Personally I’m all set. I will be watching the full Pat Cummins sandpaper denial press conference, filmed live on location in Sydney on Friday morning, and now preserved uncut and un-redacted on YouTube.

I will not speed it up, or flick through impatiently only to find myself bogged down in endless adverts for old fat guys doing military callisthenics, and pills that will dissolve the vile writhing parasites that definitely live in my guts.

This is culturally vital material. As such I will be watching it at least five times, with periods set aside for reflection, notation and, as necessary, stabbing myself in the eyeballs with a sharpened kebab skewer just to dull the pain.

The point is, this is not a task to be undertaken lightly. You will need breaks. You will need a sense of hair-shirt necessity, like forcing yourself to watch a solemnly repetitive arthouse film where people are just always smoking and talking and looking sad. At one hour and eight minutes, the Cummins presser is a bit shorter than Three Colours: White. It’s almost the same length as Battleship Potemkin, and nobody actually wants to watch that.

There are similarities though. The opening sections of Battleship Potemkin are called Men and Maggots, Drama on the Deck and A Dead Man Calls for Justice. So yeah, love that. Elite mate-ship. Battleship Potemkin is also about a heroic worker’s revolt, with the lurking sense that everything here might just succumb to the tide and the forces of history. So yeah, again. Go Team Pat.

It has been said this is a scandal that will make no sense at all to anyone not pre-converted to Test Match cricket. But a quick 20-second explainer: Australian players used sandpaper to rough up the ball to their advantage during a Test Match in Cape town eight years ago, at a time when such outlaw practices were widespread.

The problem is the plan was enacted on the field in full view of the TV cameras. Cricket is a ball-fixated team game. But three Australian players took full responsibility and had their careers derailed. The Cummins press conference was in response to claims in Usman Khawaja’s new book that in fact the entire team was in on it. Subsequent investigations had somehow failed to detect this, but did make the whole thing go away. And: breathe.

The best bit of the one hour, eight minutes is the start. Cummins looks the same: lean, super-handsome, eyes sparkling, like the future cyborg-captain of the intergalactic space fleet. But he is also unusually hyped-up, voice cracking as he gets his prepared lines in at the outset.

Khawaja’s book is, he says, a series of “allegations” that he is still “trying to understand”. Although, to be clear, trying to understand without having actually read it in full. Crucially, Cummins states that if Khawaja is saying “we knew sandpaper was going out on to the field then he’s 100% wrong”. Note how the middle part of that sentence qualifies the ending. Going out on to the field has always been key. Note also the way this replicates the statement by Australia’s bowlers in 2021. Execute. Discipline. Stick to the process.

Cummins shifts on to more general notes. We were part of a team. Usman is a friend. Usman has also betrayed not just me but all of Australian cricket. He then opens up some distance by pointing out he was 24 and playing his 13th Test at the time. Which is true. But then, the entire Cummins persona is also built on presenting himself as the opposite of that moment.

Clearly, this is an attempt at containment. Cummins says he will not be talking about it again. But like it or not, these moments capture you. What we have here is a man trying desperately not to become a meme, while visibly turning into one before our eyes.

What is happening here, really? It is hard to overstate how massive this story is in Australia. At the same time it feels like nothing at all, an entity without content beyond its own emotional hot air. On TalkSport on Friday morning, Alan Brazil asked the editor of Wisden, Lawrence Booth, if the Australian team was ripping itself apart over this, if England might take advantage. Er, actually no. That same day an Australian team with different names was gleefully tearing England apart in Perth, with Mahli Beardman – nickname suggestions: Bob, Jacob, “And Me” – taking six debut wickets.

But then Beardman was 14 years old when this happened and would surely be quite happy if the old lags faded from view. This is key to the sage, and to the sport. In cricket you basically hate your teammates. This is an individual pursuit masquerading as a team sport. You win together. But also, you don’t really. This is hard numbers, independent value, a series of conjoined duels.

Sandpapergate is a public airing of that strange internal dynamic. But it also offers a perfect mini-anatomy not just of Australian cricket, but of Australia itself. A key fact: nobody else actually cares about Sandpapergate. Initially the ICC handed out one-match bans, which seemed fair enough. Meanwhile Australia frothed and blamed, imposed ludicrously one-year exiles from all cricket, and banned David Warner from ever captaining anyone ever again.

At moments like these you remember what a culturally sui generis place Australia is, beautiful as a stage set, cities ranged warily around the coastline, a place that is wealthy, free, unspoilt, and still embracing something while also rejecting it.

It might come as a surprise, but English people love Australians. They really do, to the extent it is often a shock to realise this is not always entirely reciprocated. There is an edge there. These are not in fact your fun country cousins, but a former settlement with its own set of deep structural recalibrations still in train.

And of course cricket, that absurd scratchy formal dance, is the perfect sporting vessel. In Australia cricket has been defined by a terse but fraternal conservatism. Cricket is about toughness, resilience, the content of your character. Crucially it is about playing correctly, about being more resolute, more disciplined, more worthy (let us say it: than the English), about presenting yourself to the room, while also being better and more authentic than the room.

One reason Australians hate the sandpaper affair, the reason it hits so hard, is because it’s sneaky. It’s embarrassing. It’s mean, small, pigeon-chested. It’s basically quite English. And cricket is supposed to tell you that you’re the opposite of this, to offer hard, sunlit legitimacy, to answer the questions: are we fine now, are we good, out here still facing westwards from thousands of miles away, still trying to be better, straighter, tougher?

In a way Sandpapergate is Australia’s Bazball, another bizarre cricketing contortion, whose energy was almost entirely inward-facing. Bazball was a simple tactic, the self-congratulatory urge to bash a cricket ball around in a fast-forward, attacking manner. It was only in England that this seemed vital and seductive and profound, in those few giddy months before it dissolved in its own cult-like amour propre. The reason it hit that sweet spot, why it both enraged and delighted, is that cricket in England is about class, privilege, hierarchy, the question of who owns the space, who gets to decide the mood.

And the key quality of Bazball was its deep cultural mnemonic, the gentleman-amateur style, the idea of winning from above the fray, winning while saying, oh you didn’t actually think any of that stuff really mattered, did you, old boy. Even the body language was maddening, Ben Stokes on the balcony, vest, shades, jawline, muscular insouciance, Brendan McCullum with his feet up, oozing careless alpha-dog energy. Even when we lose we win. Because we are us, doing this.

Nobody else out there really gave a toss about all this, beyond the fact it was undeniably annoying to play against, and deeply satisfying to beat it. This was English cricket speaking to itself, and to the way it wants to be seen. Bazball was unearned exceptionalism, faux amateur nobility. Bazball was honi soit qui mal y pense in a daring reverse scoop new-ball hoick. It was also doomed and phoney, unable to progress because it wasn’t really anything but a style.

But that was English cricket’s own psychodrama, in the time of shrinkage and lost edge. And now Australia have this. It is obvious enough what should happen. No more bans. No more hand-wringing. An apology to the players who were over-punished. A rooting out of the administrators who mismanaged this farrago of weirdness when it all went down. Then let’s get on with the game.

Yeah, good luck with that. In reality this can never resolve itself with logic or cold compromise, because it’s about change, identity, what remains and what matters, about seeing a world in a grain of sandpaper. One hour and eight minutes. Frankly, we’re just getting started.