Cummins unfazed by potential revelations from Khawaja's autobiography

Khawaja's autobiography Sabr will be released on November 10, shortly after the conclusion of Australia's three-match Test series in South Africa, and Code Sports reported on Thursday that he had briefed Cummins on its contents, which remain a close-guarded secret. Unusually, Khawaja did not use a ghost-writer for the book, and its publisher Penguin Random House has not made advance copies available.

Speaking ahead of Friday's first Test in Durban, Cummins confirmed that he had spoken to Khawaja about the book and its contents. He insisted that he was not concerned by the prospect of any new revelations about the ball-tampering scandal as he had already "answered every question a million times" in the eight-and-a-half years since.

Cummins and Khawaja both played in the infamous Cape Town Test in 2018, when Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera applying sandpaper to the ball. The incident prompted Steven Smith and David Warner's resignations as captain and vice-captain respectively, and all three players involved served lengthy bans issued by Cricket Australia for bringing the game into disrepute.

When pressed for further details on his recent conversation with Khawaja and the book itself, Cummins said: "I'm not too sure. You'll need to ask him. It was obviously a long time ago. All the investigations and everything was done back then. I answered every question a million times. It was dealt with then.

"All I can say is [that] as a group, we've moved on. [I am] very happy with the last eight or nine years, how we've been as a group and evolved, and obviously my focus is on captaining the cricket team."

Australia's bowlers in the Cape Town Test - Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon - have consistently denied any knowledge of Bancroft's plans to tamper with the ball. In 2021, they issued a joint statement calling for an end to "rumour-mongering and innuendo" after Bancroft said it was "self-explanatory" that they had known more than they let on.

Australia have twice toured South Africa for limited-overs internationals since Sandpapergate, but their upcoming series is the first time they have returned for Test cricket. As a result, the build-up has been dominated by retrospectives on that series, with Warner among those to drop hints that there is still more information to come out.

South African broadcaster SuperSport, whose camera operators initially picked up Bancroft's ball-tampering, promoted the series on social media on Wednesday by re-posting footage of the incident, captioned: "Our cameras will be sharp for this 3-match Test series."

Todd Greenberg, Cricket Australia's chief executive, has travelled to South Africa with the Test squad and said that relations between the two teams had changed for the better. "We're all staying in the same hotel, both teams; we're actually having breakfast together," he said this week. "I don't think there's that heightened emotion between the teams that [used to be] here. Eight years ago is a long time."

Greenberg added: "I'm really proud of this Australian cricket team, what they've achieved over that eight-year period… It's a very different cultural environment, a very different cricket team than what came here eight years ago. The Australian public can feel very proud of that team, what they've achieved on the field and how they carry themselves off it."

Additional reporting: Andrew McGlashan