BackIt is obvious from the first paragraph what Usman Khawaja is setting out to achieve in his chapter on “Sandpaper”.
In his book Sabr (the Arabic word for patience), which was released overnight, Khawaja dedicates chapter 17 to the Sandpaper scandal, revealing the depth of the conspiracy and the split in the camp caused by the fallout when the blame game started.
He says the chapter is for Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith and “my childhood friend David Warner”. Was there a cover-up? “The truth will set you free,” he writes, setting up the division between batsmen and bowlers that has widened since the scandal. “He did it for the team. It was a thankless job, because I never saw the bowlers thank him,” he writes about Warner, whose job was to look after the ball on the field.
It is the win-at-all-costs environment that Khawaja pinpoints as the root cause of it all. A member of the coaching staff told them before leaving for South Africa that they would have to get the ball moving in the air. “I don’t care what you have to do, or how,” he says without naming the coach. “That’s the only chance we have.”
Khawaja is angry about how Australia became a snarling, nasty team and believes the fallout from Sandpapergate was partly because the public, even at home, was fed up with their behaviour. Warner had spent a period toning down his sledging. He was even nicknamed “The Reverend” by his team-mates after an ODI tour to South Africa where he was much quieter on the field.
Australia lost 5-0 and the coaches felt it blunted Australia’s edge. He was told to go hard again. “They were just too narrow-minded and thought we’d been hammered because we were too nice. They broke Davey down and convinced him that the team needed the Bull, not the Reverend.”
It all blew up in the first Test in Durban: Warner and Quentin de Kock had a confrontation in the pavilion and Nathan Lyon dropped the ball on AB de Villiers after running him out. “I couldn’t believe Nathan did it. It was so disrespectful, although of course I knew this was how the coaches wanted us to play.
“‘Gaz, what the f--- was that?’ I blew up at Nathan mid-huddle. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘I just dropped the ball. It wasn’t intentional.’
“I was p----d and walked away. It was just the environment that had been created with this team. But this wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of. It wasn’t how I wanted to play. As a team, we were going off the rails. And I say ‘as a team’, because we were all a part of this.”
Sandpaper is always knocking around a dressing room. Batsmen use it to sand down their bats and it was during a break in play in Port Elizabeth that it was tried out on a ball lying around in the changing room. It immediately had an effect, sanding down the scuffed side of the ball. “There was no way it wouldn’t reverse if we bowled with it. Everyone had a look at the ball and was laughing their heads off.”
It started before Cape Town and that is the major revelation in the book because it does two things: shows how ingrained this was in the team and casts doubt on the claim that the bowlers did not know. You can buy that if it was a rogue one-off. But for it to have happened in Port Elizabeth where the seamers took four for 28 after Bancroft had roughed up the ball, makes it highly unlikely it was not discussed between Test matches as some sort of secret weapon.
Players knew they were under scrutiny on the field. How to do it without being detected? It is an oddity and a sign of cricket’s innocence and amateurism that the umpires leave the ball by the boundary rope at the start of a session for the bowling team to pick up. It is just laziness and an opening for a team that wants to cheat. Why not hand it to them out in the middle?
Anyway, Australia saw that this quirk was their chance and Bancroft would rub sandpaper on the ball before they took the field properly and it worked. Bancroft was a willing volunteer. Steve Smith, the captain, did not stop it. A mistake he will rue for the rest of his life.
“Steve Smith put his hands up and said, ‘I don’t want to know anything about this,’ and walked out of the room,” writes Khawaja. It worked a treat. “Every time during that session the ball was passed to me at gully, I’d take a look and think, Wow, even I could reverse swing this ball. It was ridiculous. The bowlers then went to work and bowled beautifully. Reversing it around corners. We got four wickets for 28 runs.”
As always with cheating, it is a mistake that brings it crashing down. Rain meant the wetter outfield in Cape Town would make it harder to keep the ball dry and reverse it. During the break a member of the coaching staff approached Bancroft, who was sitting next to Khawaja.
“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.’
“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. Bangers had been smart up to now – he’d only been doing it during the break. The push from this coach, though, obviously made him feel like he had to do it more often. Outside of the breaks.
“‘Just be careful, mate’ is all I said. He looked at me and nodded. I was telling him to take care, because in wet conditions obviously the ball couldn’t be bone dry. But that’s exactly what sandpaper would do: make it bone dry and rough, because it would take the top wet layer off the ball. I didn’t think much of it after this. But during the next session, when I looked up at the big screen, I couldn’t believe what I saw. As clear as day, there was Bangers using the sandpaper on the ball, then putting it in his pocket. The whole ground saw it.
“At the end of the over, Steve Smith yelled, ‘Put that thing away now!’, as he ran past Bangers. I tried to act as cool as possible. I walked next to Cameron and said, ‘Bangers, get off the field now. If you don’t, you’re cooked.’ I knew putting the ball away or hiding the sandpaper wasn’t enough – he needed to get it off the field.”
The media officer and Khawaja urged Smith not to speak to the press that night, but he did it anyway because he said he would not be able to sleep. That was when he committed the first mistake of a cover-up by lying. Smith said they used tape on the ball, not sandpaper. “People weren’t stupid and they weren’t going to fall for that.”
Khawaja was not interviewed during the hasty investigation and he says Cricket Australia did not want to know the truth. “It was after the game finished that s--- really hit the fan. We were going to have a team meeting in the change-rooms. Just before it, I walked up to our manager, Gavin Dovey, and said, ‘We need to cop this as a team. We did it as a team, so we cop it as a team.’ He said I was right but that two guys in the team disagreed. This was the most disappointing part for me. I knew who those two guys were, and it was ludicrous that, out of everyone, it was them. It showed me their true colours, though. When the going got tough, all they cared about was themselves. But I wasn’t going to stop fighting this cause.
“When the team meeting took place, [Tim] Paine and [Michael] Lloyd, our sports psychologist, spoke about the situation and how, apparently, we had to look after the coaches, because they were more vulnerable than us. We’d been told that Smith, Bancroft and Davey had put their hands up to cop it, in order to save the rest of us and the coaches. I didn’t agree with that plan.
“‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘The best way out of this is if we cop it all together. There was silence when I said that. Most of the guys agreed, but Painey knew not everyone felt that way. And so my idea fell flat. The boys decided to let the three guys cop everything and I knew there and then that Smudge, Bangers and Davey were in trouble. CA did a pretty unthorough investigation after that. It was almost as if they didn’t want to find out the whole truth.”
Todd Greenberg, Cricket Australia’s chief executive, said on Tuesday that he did not see “any compelling reason” to reopen the investigation. “We have said we’re comfortable with the outcome of the investigation based on the information we’ve received. That includes what we’ve seen from Usman, and our position hasn’t changed on that.”
Khawaja does not name names, probably under instructions from lawyers. He does not need to because his whole argument was that the team were to blame as a collective, not three individuals who hatched the plan alone and were caught, which has been the official story. His book reveals sandpaper was an accident, a joke at first that then became a potential x-factor under pressure from a good South African team. Australia suspected South Africa were up to something too, although that is the childish response to being caught.
By revealing it started as a joke in the changing rooms when someone rubbed sandpaper on the ball (again unnamed) it shows many knew what was going on. They may not have known Bancroft was doing it at the very moment he was caught by cameras in Cape Town, but they had an idea something was happening and it had been going on for a while.
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