Durban, a stairwell and a lie: Jim Maxwell remembers how Australia got to sandpaper-gate

In the past week Usman Khawaja has said that the whole Australian dressing room knew about the sandpaper in Cape Town. Pat Cummins has denied while David Warner agreed with Khawaja. Jim Maxwell, who commentated on that series for ABC radio, had his own view of what went wrong, and he gave it to this daily from the commentary box at the MCG.

He was sitting in the ABC studio at the MCG during the Boxing Day Test in December 2024, looking down at the players warming up, in his 51st year of commentating on the game. “It’s a game of many moods,” he said. Then he was pulled back to 2018.

Not to Cape Town first, but to Durban. “Australia’s behaviour was outrageous in that Durban Test. I remember being on air and telling the audience that, ‘no need to talk here, let me just wind up the ‘effects’ microphone’ … the level of abuse aimed at Quinton de Kock from Nathan Lyon and Mitch Starc in particular was obnoxious. The umpires were deaf, really not doing anything. [Kumar Dharmasena and S Ravi were the officials]. They should have stepped in. So, all that was building up a bit of feeling between the two teams.”

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Maxwell had seen enough cricket to sense that the Australians were about to cross a line. After that Durban Test, before any tampering, he wrote to James Sutherland, then the chief executive of Cricket Australia. “I emailed him that you need to be having a look and eye on the behaviour of this Australian team because something is going to go wrong. I didn’t necessarily think of ball-tampering, but more from the behavioural side of things.”

Then came Port Elizabeth, where Kagiso Rabada was banned for bumping into Steve Smith, and then cleared on appeal. “It ramped up the feelings between the teams a notch,” Maxwell said. In the same Test, two Cricket South Africa officials posed laughing with fans in masks of the New Zealand rugby player Sonny Bill Williams, a taunt aimed at Warner’s wife. “Stupid silly thing to do,” Maxwell said. The board apologised and suspended both officials. In Cape Town, Australia were on the back foot and getting desperate to manufacture a wicket. There had been the Warner and de Kock stairwell episode in Durban, which Maxwell says was there for everyone to see. “So that was all going on in that series, things just kept escalating.”

David Warner and Quinton de Kock clashed in the stairwell during the Durban Test in Australia’s 2018 tour of South Africa. (AAP/File)

On the morning of that Cape Town Test, he was on air with Mark Nicholas. “We had a little chat about Steve Smith as captain before everything blew up on the field. Mark was saying he was a very naive leader just the way he behaved with DRs as he would get it wrong all the time, being swept with emotions.”

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Maxwell looked through the window at the field and wagged a finger.

“That day Smith went out after lunch and he saw Warner talking to Bancroft, giving him advice. That was his moment to intervene. He didn’t. Obviously, Warner knew he was a marked man by the SA television and they had to shift the blame out there to Bancroft.”

Steve Smith delivers a ball during the Cape Town Test in 2018. (AP Photo)

His verdict is not about the sandpaper. “The stupidity .. the blokes were done not for ball tampering but for dishonesty. … That was a lie. That’s why they got done.” He meant what was said at the press conference afterwards.

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He remembers another development. “I remember the story was, in all the aftermath, that when the officials looked at the ball in the game there was no evidence of tampering happening! Australia, I feel, had pulled back their horns a bit because I presume they were told they were being watched. It was a horrible exercise of stupidity, naivety …”

Darren Lehmann saunters into the ABC radio box, says his hellos, and gets a wisecrack from Maxwell before he picks something up and leaves. Lehmann was the coach in that series, and the question follows him out. Maxwell smiles. “Darren was certainly a part of that whole ‘must win at all costs attitude’. He was the driver of that behaviour. He may not have been complicit in the tampering episode, but the overall behaviour of that team, he has to take his blame in that part at the very least.”