The ghosts of 2018 have reared their ugly heads in Australian cricket this week, after former batter Usman Khawaja alleged that the entire Australian team knew that certain players were using sandpaper to cheat. It’s a scandal that left a stain on Australian cricket, a stain that it’s never been quite able to clean off. So in this Squiz Shortcut, we’ll get you across:

🙋🏻‍♀️ This newsletter was written by Andrew Williams

Listen to our podcast 🎧

Listen time: 12 minutes

Here’s a Squiz sum - if just 10% of our audience gave us $10 a month, we’d be able to launch new products and reach a whole lot more people. That’s why we’ve made it possible for you to support The Squiz - so we can keep making the things you already love, and start on a few new ones too...

Let’s start from scratch… When and where did this all happen?
At a Test match in Cape Town between Australia and South Africa in 2018 (a Test match takes place over 5 days, and it’s what cricket fans would regard as the purest and most important form of the game, and the one with the most tradition behind it). And yes, it’s with a capital T…

What was at stake?
This was the third Test in what was a 4-Test series and the 2 sides were locked at one-all, so whichever team won this Test match would take the lead in the series. It was tense. The incident we’re going to talk about took place on the third day of the Test match…

What went down?
During the first major break in play, which is called the lunch break, the senior players on the Australian team came up with the idea to use sandpaper on the ball to help their bowling attack. 

Why would sandpaper help?
Bowlers want one side of the ball as shiny as possible and the other side as rough or coarse as possible. That helps it swing - move from side to side through the air - which makes it harder for batters to hit. 

What are the rules around this?
You’re allowed to polish the ball and maintain the shine - as long as you use things already on your person - like your clothes, or sweat, which is why you’ll often see cricketers rubbing the ball on their pant legs. But you can’t use any foreign objects brought on to the ground for that purpose. That’s known as ball-tampering, and it’s cheating - illegal under the laws of the game. 

OK, what happened next?
At lunchtime during the game, with Australia behind and needing to catch up, senior players on the Australian team decided to do it anyway.

Who was at the centre of it?
Rookie batter Cameron Bancroft - and he got caught. In the session after lunch, cameras at the ground picked up footage of him with a small yellow object in his hands, and it was shown on the big screen at the ground. When he realised he’d been spotted, he stuffed it down his trousers. The umpires came over and he showed them his sunglasses pouch instead. Essentially, the Aussies had been caught doing what looked a lot like cheating…

How did the team explain it?
After the day’s play, the team’s captain at the time Steve Smith and Bancroft both fronted the media. Smith described the plan as being hatched by the “leadership group” - without spelling out who that was - and Bancroft said the object was sticky tape. 

And was it?
No… A later investigation found it was sandpaper, and the Aussies had knowingly cheated. As captain and vice-captain at the time, Smith and David Warner were banned for 12 months, and Bancroft was banned for 9 months for his role. Cricket Australia’s findings were that Warner came up with the plan, and Smith knew it was happening.

What about the rest of the team?
They were in the clear. The findings were that everyone else - including the bowlers, who would have been the ones who most benefited from the plan and all of whom are still in the team - didn’t know about it.

How big was the fallout?
Massive. It was one of the biggest stories of the year… Some are of the view that the men’s Test cricket captain is the second-most important position in the country after the Prime Minister - it felt like it applied here… So the fact that the players had initially lied about it before the truth came out made it worse. 

Did sponsors walk?
Some did… The investment company Magellan cancelled a naming rights deal reportedly worth $20 million. Sanitarium - the company that makes Weet-Bix - dropped Smith as an ambassador. The PM at the time Malcolm Turnbull also got involved, saying that he was “shocked and bitterly disappointed” that the cricket team had been involved in cheating. 

So why, after 8 years, is the scandal back in the news?
Over time, the Aussie cricket team went some way to recovering what was a tarnished reputation. But it’s all come up again twice this year - once because the Aussie Test team returned to South Africa for the first time since 2018, and again because retired batsman Usman Khawaja wrote about it in his new book. 

Are there players still around from that day in Cape Town?
Yep, quite a few… All 4 bowlers - Pat Cummins, Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc - are still in the team, with Cummins the long-term Test captain. Smith is still a regular fixture of the side, and has returned to captaincy roles. Warner has retired, Bancroft still plays at a state level. And Khawaja has a new book out. It’s an autobiography called Sabr: Finding my way in cricket and life… Sabr is the Arabic word for patience. 

What does the book say?
It spans his whole career, but there’s a chapter called Sandpaper where he says more players than just the 3 who were suspended - Warner, Smith and Bancroft - knew about the sandpaper use, including Khawaja himself, who was in the team for that Test match as well. He apologises to Warner and says that we “were all the architects” of the ball-tampering.

Was it a one-off?
Not according to Khawaja - he says it was used in the previous Test match as well. But he doesn’t specifically name anyone else he knew to be involved. 

So who is he pointing the finger at?
No one directly, but many have read it as implicating the bowlers, since they had the most to gain. That would take in Starc, Hazlewood and Lyon - but also the current Australian Test captain Cummins.

Has Khawaja been asked about Cummins directly?
He has… The host of the ABC’s 7.30 Sarah Ferguson asked him directly if Pat Cummins knew what was going on. He said he wasn’t going to answer that…

How have the others reacted?
Warner says he backs Khawaja’s account 100%, but others, including Starc, have said it doesn’t match up with their recollection of things. Darren Lehmann - the team’s coach at the time - has also denied it, saying Khawaja is using the scandal to sell a book. That’s something Khawaja denies - he said sandpaper was never part of the book deal when he signed it. He says he also took names out of the first draft, because he didn’t want to implicate anyone…

Is Cricket Australia going to take another look?
No… It says it stands by its findings, and said it respects that some players have “different recollections” of the incident than others. 

Why does it still matter, 8 years on?
Because 5 of the people who were in the team at the time are still in it. Now they’ve always denied it - but hypothetically, if it turned out that not only did some of those players knowingly cheat back in 2018, but also that they’ve been denying it ever since, that’d be a real problem for the current Test side.

So what’s the big unanswered question?
What’s unclear is whether Khawaja means everyone shared responsibility because of the team's culture at the time, or that specific players knew sandpaper was being used. Those are 2 very different things - and he's been challenged on whether he's risked his friends' and teammates' reputations to take some pressure off Warner, Smith and Bancroft. Either way, it’s dug up a pretty ugly period in Australian cricket, and dominated the news all week. 

Watching: This episode of the ABC’s 7.30 looks at what the Aussie cricket team knew at the time of the cheating scandal and whether there was a cover up.

Reading: And this piece shows some of the reaction to what happened.

Between end-of-year admin and a packed social calendar, there’s enough to do before a summer getaway without playing suitcase Tetris. Simplify Living can take some of the stress out of packing, with Compression Packing Cubes and anti-theft bags. Its early Black Friday sale is on now, and here’s what’s on offer.