Cheating Aussies still owe Stuart Broad an answer about the Ashes ...Middle East

Usman Khawaja’s revelations about “Sandpapergate” in his new book Sabr have brought back plenty of memories. Covering England’s Test series in New Zealand at the time, I was so close to Australia, geographically and in terms of time zone, you could feel the reverberations from the scandal even across the Tasman Sea.

England were playing a Test match in Auckland when news of Australia’s ball-tampering in Cape Town broke in March 2018.

So, on the day it happened, who better to do post-play media duties than Stuart Broad? After all, he’d been denounced as a cheat by Australia for not walking during the 2013 Trent Bridge Ashes Test.

It was one of the more memorable press conferences as Broad, part of the Ashes squad who had lost 4-0 in Australia a couple of months previously, held court in a strip-lit basement room at Eden Park.

In an address laced with schadenfreude, he said: “I saw Steve Smith say it’s the first time they’ve tried it, which to me seems really surprising they’ve changed a method that’s been working.

“Look at the Ashes series we’ve just played, look through all of those Test matches and they reverse-swing the ball sometimes in conditions you wouldn’t expect the ball to reverse. So I don’t understand why they’ve changed their method for this one game?”

The insinuation was clear. Many England players and coaches involved in that 2017-18 series were, if you asked them privately, convinced Australia had tampered with the ball in that Ashes.

England had lost convincingly. But this wasn’t sour grapes. More a feeling the Australians were not playing fair. After all, that same series started with Jonny Bairstow being accused of headbutting Cameron Bancroft in a Perth nightclub – a confected story leaked to Aussie media to destabilise and humiliate England. It worked.

It always seemed ludicrous that the three men who took the fall for “Sandpapergate” – Smith, David Warner and Bancroft – were the only ones who knew about the plot.

So Khawaja’s allegations that the whole team were in on it and that Australia had also used sandpaper in the previous Test at Port Elizabeth made sense.

Now, though, those suspicions England had about the 2017-18 Ashes appear to have been confirmed after Khawaja admitted in his book the team also tampered with the ball in that series. 

Referring to the Perth Test England lost on a damp final day, he writes: “We were reverse swinging it late on day five. Actually, we were reverse swinging the ball the game before too [in Adelaide] – except it was much tougher, because it was the pink ball.

“But we – and I say ‘we’, because we’re a team, whether you did the deed or not – had worked out that, if we raised the flaps up on the quarter seam on that ball, it was almost like it had a rudder on it and it’d start reverse swinging.”

It might not have been sandpaper, but what Khawaja describes here is still ball-tampering.

Under Law 41.3 of the Laws of Cricket, players are prohibited from taking any deliberate action that artificially alters the physical condition of the match ball. Either prising up, scratching or deteriorating the quarter seam, the small join that runs around the ball at 90 degrees to the main seam, is illegal and can carry substantial punishments.

It certainly makes Sir Alastair Cook’s comments on the BBC’s Test Match Special podcast this week more pertinent. Cook, for whom 2017-18 was his last Ashes series, said: “There were times when we played against Australia we thought the ball is doing more than we thought it should have done. Why do their bowlers get more out of the wicket than we do?”

So just how far did Australia’s cheating go? Was it just Cape Town? Was it two Tests in South Africa? Two Tests in the 2017-18 Ashes as well? More?

The bowlers – current captain Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon – have consistently denied knowledge of ball-tampering. They even released a joint statement in 2021. Starc repeated that denial when interviewed on Tuesday.

Cricket Australia have no appetite to investigate this any further, with their chief executive Todd Greenberg saying this week: “We don’t see any compelling reason to open the investigation or revisit this again. I don’t think there’s anything that can be gained.”

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That’s despite Khawaja’s testimony. Despite Warner backing his former team-mate’s version of events “100 per cent” and saying the original investigation was “botched”. Despite Chadd Sayers, a bowler on that South Africa tour, corroborating Khawaja’s claims.

And what can be gained? How about the truth? Former Australia captain Michael Clarke said this week: “Fans can’t trust what’s real. They don’t know the truth until this gets reopened.”

So why doesn’t Australian cricket finally have an honest conversation about this with zero repercussions? No fines, no bans, no recriminations. Just full transparency about the extent to which ball-tampering went on.

It would require a massive U-turn from Cricket Australia to start the process. But it would be worth it so that everybody – including Broad – can finally move on.

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