The official mythology constructed around Australian
cricket’s 2018 ball-tampering scandal is beginning to unravel. Eight years
after television cameras caught Cameron Bancroft attempting to alter the
condition of the ball with sandpaper at Newlands in Cape Town, former
Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja has declared that knowledge and
responsibility for what occurred belonged not merely to the three players
subsequently punished by Cricket Australia (CA), but to the team collectively. [smh.com.au]
The assertion appears in Khawaja’s autobiography, Sabr, with
extracts published ahead of the book’s release. His formulation could hardly be
clearer: “It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff.
All of us.” He insists he believed from the outset that the team should have
accepted responsibility collectively, rather than concentrating it on Steve
Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft. [theguardian.com]
Even more damaging is Khawaja’s claim that Cape Town was not
the beginning of the affair. According to his account, sandpaper had already
been discussed and used during the preceding Test at St George’s Park in Port
Elizabeth. He recalls open dressing-room discussion about finding a way to
roughen the ball, identifying sandpaper as an effective method, and Bancroft
volunteering to use it. He also recalls Smith indicating that he did not want
to know what was being done.
These are Khawaja's allegations, not findings established by
a new independent investigation. But if substantiated, they would be
devastating to the account Cricket Australia has accepted and defended since
2018. CA’s investigation attributed prior knowledge of the Cape Town scheme to
Smith, Warner and Bancroft. The first two received 12-month playing bans and
Bancroft nine months. Warner also received an indefinite leadership ban, which
was overturned in 2024.
Khawaja's question is therefore broader than who knew what
and when during a cricket match. It concerns how sporting institutions respond
when conduct generated within their own competitive culture threatens their
legitimacy. Sandpapergate increasingly appears not merely as an episode of
cheating but as a case study in the political economy of modern professional
sport: the creation of relentless performance pressures from above, followed by
the individualisation of responsibility when the consequences become publicly
embarrassing.
The official story comes under renewed pressure.
Khawaja’s intervention is particularly serious because he
says that, despite being a member of the Australian side and sitting beside
Bancroft during the Test, CA's investigator never interviewed him. That claim
alone warrants an explanation. An investigation claiming to establish the
boundaries of knowledge within a touring cricket team can hardly be considered
exhaustive if it did not question team members who may have had relevant
information. Yet Cricket Australia has responded by defending the integrity of
the original process. After Khawaja’s revelations, the organisation said it
remained comfortable with its investigation and its findings.
The issue is made still more significant by what had already
entered the public record. In 2021, Bancroft, when asked whether the bowlers
knew that the ball was being altered, responded that it was “self-explanatory”.
Australia’s Cape Town bowling quartet of Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh
Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon subsequently issued a joint statement categorically
denying prior knowledge that a foreign substance had been brought onto the
field to alter the ball.
Those conflicting accounts cannot be reconciled by simply
repeating the 2018 findings. Khawaja’s statement does not, by itself, prove the
precise knowledge or conduct of every individual player, and it should not be
used as a pretext for shifting the scapegoating operation from one group of
cricketers to another. That would merely reproduce the essential logic of the
original affair. The important question is not which additional individuals
should now be publicly sacrificed. It is why the institutional and cultural
circumstances that produced the scandal were reduced to the misconduct of three
men.
Three men made to carry an institutional crisis.
The extraordinarily punitive treatment of Smith, Warner and
Bancroft performed a definite function. By identifying three guilty
individuals, Cricket Australia could present the scandal as an aberration from
an otherwise healthy system rather than as the expression of that system. Khawaja
now says that he argued in the dressing room that the team should accept what
had happened collectively. His account is explicit: “We did this as a team. We
knew what was going on, and we have to take it as a team.” Instead, as he puts
it, the three punished players “got crucified”.
On Sunday, 8 November, Khawaja amplified this point, denying
allegations that he had thrown former teammates “under the bus”. He described
Smith, Warner and Bancroft as those who had taken the blame for everybody else
and said that he continued to seek collective acceptance of responsibility. This
goes to the heart of the affair. Scapegoating does not mean that the
individuals concerned bear no responsibility. It means that their individual
responsibility is isolated from the social or institutional circumstances in
which their actions developed. The system survives by converting a systemic
failure into an individual moral defect.
The mechanism is familiar throughout capitalist society. A
bank caught engaging in misconduct discovers a “rogue trader”. A corporation
confronted with illegality finds a handful of wayward employees. A government
department confronted with a scandal promises disciplinary action against
individual officials while preserving the policy and hierarchy that produced
the disaster. Professional sport, increasingly organised according to the same
commercial imperatives as every other major entertainment industry, operates no
differently. The essential purpose is containment.
“Winning without counting the cost”
A striking contradiction sits at the centre of the
Sandpapergate narrative. The supposedly aberrant behaviour of three Australian
cricketers occurred within an organisation whose own subsequent cultural review
identified serious problems concerning its fixation upon winning. The
independent review Cricket Australia commissioned and The Ethics Centre
conducted examined the organisation’s culture after Cape Town. Its central
finding was that Australian cricket had developed what it termed a culture of
“winning without counting the costs”. The review concluded that the emphasis
placed upon winning had contributed to an erosion of organisational culture and
that aspects of player management encouraged negative behaviour.
That wording is significant. CA emphasised that the review
did not characterise the organisation as simply pursuing “win at all costs”,
but rather as seeking to “win without counting the cost”. The distinction
hardly exonerates the organisation. Instead, it identifies the institutional
mechanism more precisely. The pursuit of victory had become separated from
serious consideration of the methods used to obtain it and the consequences for
players, opponents, and the game itself. The review did not confine itself to
what occurred on the field. The Ethics Centre specifically framed winning as extending
from on-field tactics to the formation of elite players and “the way in which
the ‘business’ of cricket is undertaken”.
This was therefore never simply a story about sandpaper. It
was about an institutional structure in which performance, commercial success,
reputation and victory had become mutually reinforcing imperatives. Yet the
public drama of 2018 transformed this broader organisational crisis into the
personal disgrace of three players. The contradiction could scarcely be
clearer. The cultural investigation acknowledged institutional conditions that
encouraged harmful behaviour, while the disciplinary narrative kept
responsibility for Sandpapergate tightly individualised.
The commodification of cricket
Cricket's transformation over recent decades provides the
broader context. Elite cricket is no longer organised principally around the game's
rhythms, traditions, or even competitive requirements. It exists within an
expanding international entertainment market dominated by broadcast contracts,
sponsorship, franchise competitions and the ceaseless production of
commercially saleable sporting content.
This does not mean that highly paid international cricketers
are equivalent to ordinary wage workers. Plainly they are not. A small layer of
elite athletes can earn sums unavailable to the overwhelming majority of the
population. But their privileged remuneration does not emancipate professional
sport from capitalist social relations. It integrates the athletes far more
completely into them. Their performances become commodities. Their
personalities become brands. Their competitions become broadcast products.
National identity itself becomes commercially exploitable material.
What appears publicly as an almost religious obsession with
Australian cricketing supremacy therefore coincides with thoroughly material
interests. Victory attracts audiences. Audiences sustain broadcasters.
Broadcast exposure attracts sponsors. Success enhances individual commercial
value. Failure threatens contracts, careers, reputations and institutional
revenues. The romantic mythology of representing the nation consequently
coexists with a ruthless commercial structure.
Within such a system, exhortations to win are never
abstract. They descend through administrators, selectors, coaches and players
as concrete pressures. A sporting culture that measures almost everything
according to competitive success inevitably produces individuals searching for
marginal advantages. The boundary between permissible innovation, gamesmanship
and outright violation becomes increasingly vulnerable when winning assumes
overriding importance.
This does not excuse cheating. It explains why moral sermons
about three defective personalities explain so little. Indeed, the post-Cape
Town cultural review commissioned by CA itself reached beyond individual
misconduct. The Ethics Centre interviewed administrators, current and former
cricketers and sponsors, scrutinising policies, remuneration structures,
ethical frameworks and codes of conduct. The resulting institutional critique
sits uneasily beside the insistence that the decisive responsibility for Cape
Town could nevertheless be neatly confined to three players.
National morality and the business of sport
Sandpapergate acquired its extraordinary emotional force
because Australian cricket had long presented itself as something more than
professional entertainment. The national team was invested with claims about
Australian character: toughness, honesty, aggression, resilience and playing
hard but supposedly within an identifiable moral boundary. The visual spectacle
of Bancroft concealing the sandpaper therefore punctured something more
commercially valuable than the surface of a cricket ball. It damaged a national
brand. Once the affair became a crisis of legitimacy, punishment had to be
demonstrative. That process also reveals the peculiar hypocrisy surrounding
professional sport. The relentless pursuit of competitive advantage is
celebrated until someone crosses a boundary that too clearly exposes the
system's logic. At that point administrators suddenly rediscover morality.
The individual offender becomes useful precisely because he
permits the institution to perform moral purification. Expulsion, suspension
and public humiliation supposedly demonstrate the health of the organisation
rather than raising questions about the environment that produced the offending
action. Thus structural responsibility disappears precisely when it is most
necessary to examine it.
Khawaja and collective responsibility
Khawaja’s most important contribution is therefore not
simply his allegation concerning how many people knew about sandpaper. It is
his insistence upon collective responsibility. That principle runs directly
counter to the institutional logic through which Sandpapergate was resolved. If
Khawaja’s account is accurate, the entire basis for the scandal's public
containment becomes questionable. But even independently of his specific
allegations, the cultural findings commissioned by CA after Cape Town had
already demonstrated something broader: Australian cricket possessed
institutional problems that could not rationally be explained through the moral
character of three players.
Khawaja's eight-year delay in speaking publicly will
inevitably be used against him. Critics can point out that the revelations
accompany the publication of a commercially sold autobiography. That does not
answer what he has alleged. Nor does the observation that memories differ after
eight years resolve the conflict between his account and previous statements. The
contradictions now require evidence, not insinuation.
If CA is confident in
the 2018 investigation, nothing should threaten reopening the factual record
through a genuinely independent process capable of establishing who was
questioned, what evidence was gathered, how conclusions were reached, and
whether significant testimony was excluded. Anything less leaves the obvious
question unanswered: why was Khawaja, a member of the team who now says he
possessed directly relevant information, not interviewed?
The unresolved meaning of Sandpapergate
Nevertheless, there is a danger in treating another
investigation merely as an exercise in finding additional guilty individuals. That
would miss the larger lesson. Sandpaper gate’s significance lies in the
relationship between individual action and institutional pressure. The
objective should not be to replace three scapegoats with six, eight or eleven.
It is to understand how a culture was created in which such conduct became
conceivable and how, when that culture produced a public disaster,
responsibility was concentrated upon the most convenient individuals.
Smith, Warner and Bancroft unquestionably carried
responsibility for their own conduct as established in the disciplinary
process. But personal responsibility and institutional responsibility are not
mutually exclusive. Insisting that one abolishes the other is the ideological
sleight of hand that scapegoating depends on. The cultural review Cricket
Australia subsequently commissioned seriously undermined that simplistic
explanation. It identified a cricketing organisation damaged by its approach to
winning and by its failure to reckon adequately with the costs of pursuing
success. Khawaja has now reopened the even more explosive question of whether
the Sandpapergate investigation's narrow attribution of knowledge holds up.
Eight years later, Cricket Australia can no longer credibly
respond simply by repeating its confidence in the original process. The deepest
issue raised by Cape Town was never whether three Australian cricketers
suddenly lost their moral compass. It was why a sporting institution saturated
with competitive and commercial pressure produced such conduct, and why, when
the affair exploded publicly, institutional survival demanded individualising
responsibility.
Khawaja’s blunt formulation, “It was all of us”, cuts
through the carefully constructed mythology of 2018. Whatever further evidence
establishes about the knowledge of particular individuals, it points to a truth
that extends far beyond cricket. When institutions create the conditions for
misconduct but punish only those caught enacting it, scapegoating does not
correct systemic failure. It is one of the main ways the system protects
itself.
Bibliography
Cricket Australia. “Reviews Published into Cricket Culture.”
cricket.com.au, 29 October 2018. [cricket.com.au]
Cricket Australia. “All 42 Culture Review Recommendations.” cricket.com.au,
29 October 2018. [cricket.com.au]
The Ethics Centre. Australian Cricket: A Matter of
Balance. Review commissioned by the Board of Cricket Australia, October
2018. [sportnz.org.nz]
The Ethics Centre. “Cricket Australia: A Matter of Balance.”
The review records its central finding that CA had developed a culture of
“winning without counting the costs”. [ethics.org.au]
The Ethics Centre. “Renewing the Culture of Cricket in
Australia.” 26 November 2019. [ethics.org.au]
Khawaja, Usman. Sabr. Autobiography, forthcoming at
the date of this article, with publication scheduled for 10 November 2026. The
Sandpapergate claims discussed above derive from material released ahead of
publication. [smh.com.au]
Sydney Morning Herald. “It was all of us: Khawaja blows the
whistle on more sandpaper use in South Africa in 2018.” 7 November 2026. This
is the principal published source for Khawaja’s account of the dressing-room
discussions and alleged use of sandpaper at Port Elizabeth. [smh.com.au]
ESPN. “‘It was all of us’ — Khawaja exposes sandpaper
details from 2018.” 6 November 2026. [espn.com]
The Guardian. “‘It was all of us’: Khawaja says entire
Australia team knew about sandpaper ball tampering plot.” 7 November 2026.
Reuters. “Khawaja denies throwing ‘anyone under the bus’
with comments about ball-tampering scandal.” 8 November 2026. [reuters.com]
