Eight years after the Cape Town ball-tampering scandal, former Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja says responsibility extended beyond the three players. His intervention further undermines the official account that reduced a systemic crisis in Australian cricket to the misconduct of three individuals.
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]
