Cummins rejects Khawaja's sandpaper claims as 'utter nonsense' in lengthy press conference

In an indoor cricket centre in Sydney, with more than a dozen TV cameras trained on him and a crowd of reporters several times that number, Australia captain Pat Cummins spent 68 minutes answering questions about the most damaging episode in the modern history of his sport. He had called the press conference himself, and he opened by promising to take every question, because, he said, he did not want to talk about this again after today.

The trigger was the autobiography of his former team-mate Usman Khawaja, titled Sabr, published this week. In 2018, Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were punished for a plot to tamper with the ball using sandpaper during Australia's Test against South Africa in Cape Town. Khawaja writes that the whole team, Cummins included, knew about the scheme and should have shared responsibility. He also alleges that a coach urged the team to find ways of making the ball swing, that Bancroft was later encouraged to cheat, and that his own request for collective responsibility was turned down by two players he does not name. Khawaja says he was never interviewed in the investigation, even though he sat next to Bancroft in the changing rooms at Newlands.

Cummins rejected all of it in blunt terms. If Khawaja means the team knew sandpaper was going onto the field, he said, he is 100% wrong, and he has said for eight years that he did not know. The suggestion that he and others were architects of a tampering scheme he called complete and utter nonsense. There was, he said, no masterplan, no team meeting and no bowlers laying out what had to happen. He said he recalls no request for shared responsibility, and no rejection of one. Of Khawaja's account he said there are big leaps where his old team-mate is vague.

His tone toward Khawaja was careful but pained. Khawaja is a friend, Cummins said, but friends are not casual with each other's lives and reputations, and in the book he had been casual with his and with many others. He supports Khawaja telling his story, he said, but people must be accountable for what they say. The two played 56 Tests together before Khawaja retired from international cricket in January, and were also team-mates at New South Wales. Cummins admitted he was annoyed to be put in this position and had been grappling with how to square the friendship with the past week. He has been in touch with Khawaja and Smith since the book came out, but not Warner.

Cummins also addressed the practical questions. He said sandpaper could be in a dressing room because bowlers sometimes use it in training to practise with a reverse-swinging ball, and that training balls are occasionally scuffed with sandpaper or even a Stanley knife. He has seen one instance of ball-tampering in his career, in a Sheffield Shield match, when a player took a bottletop onto the field. He has no recollection of tampering in the 2017-18 Ashes. Asked whether he must have suspected the Cape Town ball, he said bowlers often touch the ball as little as possible to keep it dry for reverse swing. He was 24, playing his 13th Test, and said he noticed things then that he now realises could have been cheating. He also called the one-year bans for Smith and Warner and the nine-month suspension for Bancroft heavy handed, and recalled disliking the team's arrogance and ugliness toward umpires and opponents, something he says he has worked to change as captain.

He said he had been advised some of Khawaja's claims are defamatory but will take no legal action. He has met Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg, who he said has reviewed the original investigation files since the book appeared and found the accounts consistent. Greenberg has said he will not reopen the inquiry.

The country is split. Warner, working as an analyst for Fox Cricket during the one-day series against England, said he sticks with Khawaja, accused the captain of throwing him under the bus, called the investigation botched and said the matter will not rest. Seam bowler Chadd Sayers has also backed Khawaja. Former coach Darren Lehmann, his assistant Graeme Hick and bowler Mitchell Starc have rejected the claims. Cummins, Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon, the Cape Town attack and still Australia's first-choice bowlers, have always denied knowing of the plot, including in a joint statement in 2021.

Cummins, 33, has played 77 Tests and captained since 2021. He dismissed talk that his captaincy is under threat and gestured to a Sheffield Shield match under way outside, with an ODI about to begin in Perth. It has been eight years, he said, and a line has to be drawn. Khawaja and Warner, who has yet to publish a book of his own, are both expected to respond.