The publication of Usman Khawaja’s autobiography, Sabr, on Tuesday 10 November, has brought the sandpaper scandal of March 2018 back to public prominence. (The Pavilion End account was posted on 30 March 2018.)
The event exploded on the third afternoon of the third Test of the 2017-18 series between South Africa and Australia at Newlands, Cape Town. The series had been played in exceptionally bad spirit on both sides, exacerbated by Australia’s desperate urge to win at all costs. Both sides were doing all they could to get reverse swing on the ball and give their bowlers an advantage. On that third afternoon Australian batter Cameron Bancroft was shown on the big TV screen to be working on the ball with some sort of yellow substance which he then concealed about his person. At a cringeworthy press conference after play that day Bancroft, accompanying captain Steve Smith, said he had used sticky tape to tamper with the ball. Smith apologised, saying it was a “big mistake” initiated by the “leadership group”, that it was an embarrassment for the entire dressing-room, but that he remained the best person to lead the side.
Next morning – 25 March – all hell broke loose. The Australian public, hearing the news, were outraged, from the Prime Minister down. (The Australian side was already loathed everywhere else.) The International Cricket Council imposed customarily token penalties for ball-tampering on Smith and Bancroft.
Cricket Australia (“CA”) though, took a very different view. By the time the match resumed Smith and vice-captain David Warner, who, it transpired, had delegated the task of “ball management” to Bancroft, had lost their positions for the rest of the match. Chief executive James Sutherland launched an investigation into the incident. By 27 March the investigation had concluded that Smith, Warner and Bancroft were guilty of bringing the game into disrepute and were sent home. The investigation found that Bancroft had used sandpaper, not sticky tape. Smith and Warner were effectively banned from all cricket for a year, Bancroft for nine months. As Wisden’s chronology puts it, the investigation “is satisfied that [coach Darren] Lehmann did not know of the plan and – to some suspicion – says that no other players were involved.” The investigation was done and dusted by 28 March.
Needless to say, in the intervening years there has been much speculation about what actually happened. In 2021 Bancroft, asked if the bowlers knew what was going on, said, basically, what do you think? This prompted the bowlers – Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins – to issue a statement to the effect that they knew nothing about sandpaper being used on the ball until they saw the images on the big screen. (Starc, Hazlewood and Lyon were members of the leadership group, implicated by Smith, but Cummins, much the junior, was not.) In 2022, Tim Paine, who succeeded Smith as captain, wrote his autobiography. He said that he had no idea what was going on until he saw the images on the big screen. But he also said that his feeling at the time was that the team should have taken collective responsibility for what happened.
Khawaja’s book – I got the audio version on Tuesday – contains a number of fascinating points. He says that a lot of stuff the reader will have read about Sandpapergate is not true. He says – and nobody disputes this – that ball-tampering was rampant, and that when it was happening in games in which he was involved, he always knew it was happening and so did everyone else. At Cape Town Khawaja was sitting next to Bancroft in the dressing room and heard him talking with the bowling coach. The CA inquiry did not question him.
Khawaja also makes the same point as Paine, about everyone accepting responsibility. He made the point to the team manager before a team meeting in Cape Town. The manager said he agreed but there were two team members who strongly disagreed. Khawaja knew who they were but does not name them. He raised the issue at the meeting anyway; he says he realised Paine knew the room was not fully behind the idea, and it got nowhere.
The two critical points made in the book are the state of knowledge of the team and the situation in Port Elizabeth. Dealing with the latter point first, he says the use of sandpaper was first raised in the dressing room there during the second Test. A batter was using sandpaper on his bat and someone rubbed it on a ball. The results looked promising. There was talk of using it on the field. According to Khawaja, Smith walked out saying he did not want to hear this. Bancroft volunteered to do the job. It could be done at the start of a session, after an interval, when the umpires would leave the ball on the ground and no cameras would be looking. The ball was swinging round corners on the second day as South Africa lost four wickets for 28 runs. One of the bowlers, in the huddle after a wicket, said the ball was doing too much and they should stop working on it.
Interestingly, commentator Neil Manthorp, in Wisden’s comprehensive coverage of Sandpapergate (“The View From South Africa”) makes some comments about Port Elizabeth. He says that after the first Test at Durban, which Australia won, A B de Villiers asked his former captain, Graeme Smith, now himself a commentator, if he could get the SuperSport cameramen to focus a bit on what was happening to the ball on its way to the bowler. Khawaja also makes this point, but not the next one, namely that the match referee and umpires had made the same request. Both Manthorp and Khawaja note that Warner took the field at Port Elizabeth with heavily bandaged hands. The cameras revealed nothing about ball-tampering.
The big difference between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town was that Bancroft started working on the ball during play rather than at the end of an interval. This may explain quite a lot. The bowlers’ 2021 statement was focussed very much on Cape Town, as was, apparently – nobody has seen a report – the CA inquiry. The players – even Smith and Warner – might have been genuinely surprised and shocked to see the images on the TV screen.
(No one, incidentally, should feel any sympathy for the South Africans. According to Khawaja they were still tampering with the ball after Bancroft was caught, and they were much better at it than the Australians.)
This brings us to the state of knowledge.
Khawaja wrote the book himself. It reads very well, very authentically, especially perhaps the audio version narrated by him. One can, however, detect the involvement of our learned friends in this chapter. No names are mentioned, except Smith, Warner and Bancroft (the mention of Paine is incidental). He doesn’t actually say in the book that everyone knew, it is suggested by nuance, by references to the intimacy of the dressing room, the banter, the reference, alluded to above, that in other teams he had played in, everyone knew if the ball was being tampered with. He was more explicit in media appearances prior to publication. He told the Sydney Morning Herald “it was everyone”. Then, on Instagram, he said that was a reference to collective responsibility. But he continued “Am I going to deny that everyone knew? No.”
There is a story of Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower of London by James I, deciding to occupy his time by writing a history of the world. He had been working on this for some time when an incident occurred in the vicinity of his cell; some gaolers got into a fight, and one of them was killed. Over the next few weeks Raleigh interviewed the participants several times, attempting to find out the truth of what happened. In the end he abandoned his inquiry, and his history of the world.
It is very difficult to establish whether a given person knows a particular thing or not. If they don’t admit knowledge how do you establish it? They may have known it once but forgotten it. As many have pointed out, we are now in a “he said, she said” situation. Everyone seems to agree that the bowlers “must have known”; that is not the same as saying they knew. As mentioned above, what seems plausible is that they did not know sandpaper was being used during play on the third afternoon at Cape Town, when the ball was inspected by the umpires and not changed.
Warner, silent for all these years, has endorsed Khawaja’s account. Starc has repeated the bowlers’ denial of knowledge, specifically including Port Elizabeth. News reports suggest that the Australian public is not behind Khawaja. Some people, including former captain Michael Clarke, are calling upon CA to hold a further inquiry, but as matters stand at the moment this seems unlikely. The rest of the cricket world is naturally relishing Australia’s discomfiture. The strains of “Same old Aussies, always cheating!” should ring out more breezily than ever from the stands during the 2027 Ashes.
Of course this discussion would not be taking place at all if CA had not made such a complete mess of handling the crisis in the first place. They held a hurried inquiry designed specifically not to find out what had happened, and then imposed massively disproportionate penalties. Part of the problem, as Greg Baum pointed out, again in Wisden, was that the “crime” was so “brazen, blatant and inept”. This is not to endorse ball-tampering, but if Smith had been stripped of the captaincy and suspended for a couple of games, that would probably have been that. As it happens, Khawaja observes that Smith was content to take the hit.
I conclude with a quote from Manthorp: “There was barely a cricket follower in the country who hadn’t seen Bancroft’s panic or Warner’s bandages. But the sight of Smith being hustled through Johannesburg airport by armed police to a background of taunts and jeers took things to an unacceptable level of nastiness. It had all spiralled out of control.”
