There is a passage in Usman Khawaja’s memoir in which he details how Steve Smith talked him out of his plan to tell all to Cricket Australia officials after he had bailed up the sacked Test captain on the way back to his hotel room in Johannesburg in 2018.
Smith had just been suspended for a year, along with vice-captain David Warner, while a nine-month ban had been meted out to Warner’s opening partner Cameron Bancroft – the bearer of the sandpaper in South Africa.
“Smudge, this isn’t right’,” Khawaja writes that he told Smith. “I won’t stand for this. It wasn’t just you … I’m going right up to them and letting them know.”
Smith, in Khawaja’s telling, was having none of it – despite his state of devastation.
“It’s OK, man, it’s on me. I should have stopped it. Don’t do anything – I don’t want to drag anyone else into this’,” he replied, according to Khawaja.
Khawaja writes: “I blew up, because it wasn’t just on him. But Smudger kept blocking me, then finished by pleading with me not to say anything. It didn’t sit right with me. It still doesn’t, but I couldn’t just go against the captain’s wishes. He was ready to cop his one-year ban.”
Those of us who reported on the series on the ground in South Africa recall Smith appearing in the foyer of the hotel soon after this conversation would have taken place, his suitcase in tow, to farewell teammates before flying home.
Eight years later, as the ghost of Sandpapergate drives a wedge between a generation of Australian players, the former leader has been watching events unfold from New York, where he owns an apartment.
In his explosive version of what occurred in South Africa , Khawaja implies the whole team knew about Australia’s ball-tampering and that sandpaper was used in the second match of the series as well as the infamous third Test at Newlands.
His rewriting of the record has been endorsed by Warner, who broke an eight-year silence on the subject on Monday evening, saying: “Now everyone knows the truth”.
The situation is more complicated for Smith, who, unlike the retired Khawaja and Warner, is still in the Australian team and due back in the country later this week to begin preparations for a four-Test campaign against New Zealand.
The 37-year-old knew what was coming with the release of Khawaja’s autobiography, Sabr . He was contacted by his long-time former teammate before the book’s release, as were other key parties including current Australian captain Pat Cummins and Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg.
Whether Smith chooses to weigh in remains to be seen, but the fact he still shares a dressing room with Cummins and fellow Australian bowlers Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon may be a consideration.
It is one thing for ex-players like Khawaja and Warner to be offside with members of the national team, but if Smith – or another current player – backs their version of events, it could tear the side apart.
Starc on Tuesday maintained the bowlers’ previously outlined position that they were not aware of Australia’s tampering efforts.
They had done so in a 2021 statement that Khawaja writes “really pissed me off, but not as much as it pissed Davey off”.
“I got some pretty heated texts that night. I’m not sure about Smudge, but I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled,” he says in the book.
Khawaja does not explicitly write that the whole team was in the loop about the use of sandpaper on the ball to achieve reverse swing, although in a social media video has said he “won’t deny” that everyone knew.
In the book there are also suggestions of broader knowledge of the covert bid to alter the condition of the ball, most notably a conversation involving an unnamed coach before Bancroft made the fateful decision to take sandpaper onto the ground in Cape Town.
“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.
“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.”
Greenberg says that re-opening the CA investigation , hurried and limited in scope, would achieve little, given the vastly differing recollections of those on the tour and testimony provided at the time.
But Khawaja’s claims can’t simply be ignored.
No one is calling for heads to roll, or fresh sanctions to be imposed, but the issue will continue to fester while officials refuse to address it in a meaningful way.
While most attention is on who knew what, Khawaja’s wider point is that the team should have taken the fall for the whole business together.
It might have taken him eight years to come out with it, but he’s right.
As for Smith, who took his medicine as a captain who looked the other way, it’s unclear whether he has any appetite to revisit an episode that represents the nadir of his career.
Warner, presented as the mastermind of the sandpaper conspiracy, has welcomed Khawaja’s account, which relieves him of some of the burden he has carried.
Smith has given every indication that he wants to leave it all behind him.
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