This is the kind of revelation that refuses to stay buried. Eight years after sandpapergate, Usman Khawaja has not just reopened the story — he has widened it, and in doing so he has blown fresh air through one of Australian cricket’s most uncomfortable chapters.
Khawaja’s claim is blunt enough to matter: the whole Australian team knew what was going on during the 2018 South Africa tour. Not just the three men who were punished. Not just the players caught in the immediate fallout. In Khawaja’s telling, it was a team matter, from the batters to the bowlers to the staff, and the scandal started earlier than the famous Newlands Test in Cape Town.
That is the real sting here. The official line has long been that only David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft had prior knowledge of the plot. Cricket Australia backed that conclusion with bans of 12 months for Warner and Smith and nine months for Bancroft after the tour. But Khawaja says the sandpaper was first discussed and used in Port Elizabeth, during the previous Test, and that changes the shape of the story completely.
A story that starts before Newlands
Khawaja’s recollection puts the key moment on the second day of the previous match in Port Elizabeth, before the scandal erupted publicly at Newlands. That matters because it pushes the issue away from a single desperate act in one venue and towards something more corrosive: a culture of shared knowledge. If his account is right, then sandpapergate was never just about three players and one covert plan. It was about a wider group living with it, tolerating it and, at least in Khawaja’s words, knowing exactly what was happening.
He has also said he wrote contemporaneous notes in the team’s Sandton hotel, with the knowledge and backing of his wife-to-be, Rachel. He even recalled telling teammates after the game to take it as a team, because “we did this as a team” and “we knew what was going on”.
That is a brutal sentence for Australian cricket to absorb. It strips away the comfort of containment. It suggests the scandal was not isolated misconduct by a small inner circle, but something broader that the sport has spent years trying to keep within neat boundaries.
And that is why this moment lands so heavily now. In 2021, Pat Cummins, Mitch Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon released a statement denying knowledge of a foreign substance being taken onto the field. Khawaja’s version does not merely challenge the memory of one tour. It presses directly against the public record that has held for years.
Of course, Khawaja is also clear about something else: he did not want to be the one saying this. He has said that in an ideal world he would not be doing it, that he did not want to come out and talk about the truth, and that he thought after eight years the truth would already have emerged. Maybe, he suggested, David Warner would have exposed it or someone else would have talked more. Instead, he says, it has come down to this.
That is the uncomfortable part. If his account is accurate, then the scandal has always been bigger than the version that was eventually punished. If it is not, then Australian cricket has yet another damaging dispute over one of the sport’s ugliest episodes. Either way, sandpapergate is not staying politely in the past. Khawaja has dragged it back into the open, and he has made sure it looks even messier than before.
