‘You can’t say sandpaper’: Coach allegedly told Smith, Bancroft to lie

Former Australian bowling coach David Saker has been accused of telling Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft to lie in their infamous press conference in South Africa about the team’s use of sandpaper.

Eight years after one of Australian cricket’s most infamous episodes, more details are emerging about what allegedly occurred in South Africa following the release of Usman Khawaja’s autobiography.

Australia’s bowlers at the time, including current captain Pat Cummins, have been under the most scrutiny since Khawaja detailed his account of events, insinuating that the whole team knew about the tampering efforts and claiming sandpaper was also deployed in the match before the Cape Town Test near the boundary rope after breaks in play.

But the part played in South Africa by Saker, then the team’s bowling coach, has also been discussed behind the scenes since Khawaja’s book hit the shelves.

According to tour sources, he urged Smith and Bancroft not to reveal the nature of the yellow object that had been taken onto the field at Newlands at their media conference after play on the day the scandal took off.

“You can’t say sandpaper,” Saker is alleged to have said repeatedly.

Bancroft and Smith were advised by others not to lie, but Bancroft told reporters soon after that it had been tape, not sandpaper, in his possession and that he had been utilising it to lift granules from the pitch to rub on one side of the ball. It wasn’t until Cricket Australia announced sanctions against Smith, Bancroft and David Warner that it was publicly admitted he had actually had sandpaper in his hand.

There is no mention of Saker’s comments in Khawaja’s memoir, in which he recounts how, in an atmosphere of “disarray”, he and Australian team media manager Kate Hutchison attempted to talk Smith out of fronting the news cameras that evening.

However, there are other references in the book to an unnamed coach, which is understood to be Saker.

One of them centres around a conversation Khawaja claimed he witnessed between a coach and Bancroft during the lunch break before Bancroft was caught out.

“With a smile on his face, he said, ‘Bangers, whatever you’re doing, we need more of it. It’s wet out there – we just need more of it,’” Khawaja writes of the coach, who he does not name.

“Then I saw Bangers pick up a piece of sandpaper and put it in his pocket. The coach gave both me and Cameron a wry smile of satisfaction and walked away.”

Tour sources say Khawaja was also talking about Saker when he recalled a team meeting before the South African series in which he claimed a coach had implored players to take what measures they needed to in order to manufacture reverse swing.

“Guys, I don’t care what happens, but Test cricketers are too good against the straight ball,” the unidentified coach said, according to Khawaja.

“We need to get the ball shifting when it gets old. I don’t care what you have to do, or how, but we need to get it moving in the air. That’s the only chance we have.”

Saker, who helped mastermind England’s drought-breaking Ashes victory in Australia in 2010-11 and was also England’s bowling coach for the 2013, 2023 and 2025-26 Ashes, was known to use the term “shifting” for swinging the ball.

He was contacted for comment on Thursday.

Tour sources believe the former Victoria and Melbourne Renegades coach signed a non-disclosure agreement with CA after leaving the organisation in February 2019.

Saker did, however, speak to this masthead in 2021 after a Bancroft interview in the UK re-ignited debate about who was responsible for Australia’s cheating.

“There was a lot of people to blame. It could have been me to blame, it could have been someone else. It could have been stopped and it wasn’t, which is unfortunate,” Saker said at the time.

“You could point your finger at me, you could point your finger at ‘Boof’ [then coach Darren Lehmann], could you point it at other people, of course you could.

“We all know that we made a monumental mistake. The gravity wasn’t as plain until it all came out.”

Khawaja writes in his book that in a team meeting after the third Test, new captain Tim Paine and team psychologist Michael Lloyd “spoke about the situation and how, apparently, we had to look after the coaches, because they were more vulnerable than us”.

Khawaja’s version of events about South Africa, supported by Warner, has exposed a tense divide between a generation of players over who knew what.

Chadd Sayers, a back-up bowler on the 2018 tour who played his one and only Test in the final match of the series in Johannesburg, has also backed Khawaja.

“I believe in what Uzzie said,” Sayers told this masthead, adding that like Khawaja, he wasn’t interviewed during the CA investigation in South Africa.

The bowlers’ insistence that they were oblivious to Australia’s underhanded tactics angered Khawaja and Warner, who had been the team’s unofficial “ball manager” and was followed closely in the field by the local broadcaster’s cameras in South Africa.

The bowlers’ 2021 statement was focused on the Cape Town incident but Cummins, who is addressing media in Sydney on Friday, is likely to be questioned about Khawaja’s claims that about Australia tampering with the ball before Newlands.

Mitchell Starc, the first of the fast bowlers to speak about Khawaja’s claims this week, said he stood by their position. Asked whether he was conscious of any ball tampering in teams he played in, he replied: “Not that I’m aware of”.

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