Anyone interested in the integrity of sport must ask Cricket Australia this question

Opinion

November 11, 2026 — 3:30pm

I was there when Usman Khawaja hit twin tons at the SCG on his return to the Test side in 2022. I remember the roar of the crowd and his imitation of LeBron James’ iconic ‘Silencer’ celebration like it was yesterday.

As a cricketer of South Asian descent, one who played for the same junior rep cricket side as Khawaja, I’d always looked up to him as a role model. His languid, laissez-faire technique masked a tenacity to continually work his way back into wearing the Baggy Green, and it was a characteristic I always tried to emulate, albeit with far less success.

I just wish he hadn’t done the interview with this masthead before releasing his book.

The fallout from Khawaja’s revelations on ‘Sandpapergate’ has been extraordinary. If his account is true, which his former teammate and childhood friend David Warner has endorsed, it raises serious questions about whether the initial investigation uncovered the full extent of what happened during one of the darkest episodes in Australian sporting history.

Yet that hasn’t been what public discourse has been about. It’s been ‘why now and not when your teammates received their bans?’ It’s been fatigue from a story that’s hung over the team for more than eight years, and most prevalently it’s been ‘he’s just doing it to sell a book’.

Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But it’s the wrong debate.

To reduce Khawaja’s intervention simply to a cynical marketing ploy is not only lazy, it takes away from the bigger picture. Usman could have released a feel-good memoir about the boy from Islamabad who achieved the Australian dream and became Australia’s first Muslim Test cricketer. Instead, he touched the third rail. He invited instant public blowback and alienated former teammates. Whatever can be made of his timing, one of his greatest assets with the willow in hand, this is hardly a self-serving cash grab for a professional cricketer of almost two decades.

Of course, the timing invites questions, and I can understand that frustration. Khawaja has a book to sell, and he chose to make those revelations in the lead-up to its release. But while there is nothing wrong with questioning his motives, there is something wrong with allowing those questions to overshadow the more important ones raised by what he’s said.

Because at some point, what needs to matter is the truth.

If the entire Australian team and coaching staff knew what was going on, that matters. It matters not least for the three players who copped the bans while the others escaped sanctions. It matters for the way history will look back on this dark period of Australian cricket. And it matters because the public was given a particular version of events in 2018, one that has now been seriously challenged by someone who was there.

We might never know the truth. Mitchell Starc has already come out to stand by the 2021 statement the bowling unit released amid growing speculation they knew what was going on.

The wording of that statement will only attract more and more scrutiny as this story continues to be pieced together. But what is worth noting is that the statement can still technically be reconciled with Khawaja’s account. It is entirely possible that the entire team knew sandpaper was being used near the boundary rope once the ball was out of the umpires’ sight, while the bowlers could still truthfully claim they didn’t know an abrasive substance was physically ‘taken onto the field’. It’s a tightly worded statement and some credit is due to whoever wrote it for technically not lying, if of course Khawaja’s account is the truth.

Which brings us back to Cricket Australia.

Khawaja said he was never interviewed as part of the original investigation, despite being present in the dressing room and sitting next to Cameron Bancroft during the Cape Town Test. Yet CA Chief Executive Todd Greenberg has already ruled out reopening the investigation, maintaining that the organisation remains comfortable with its original findings.

That should concern anyone interested in the integrity of Australian sport.

The issue is not necessarily whether CA deliberately covered anything up. It is whether an investigation conducted by a sporting organisation, into conduct that could implicate its own players, coaching staff and institutional reputation, should be allowed to run without external scrutiny. These organisations cannot expect the public to accept their findings as definitive while resisting further scrutiny when those findings are challenged, particularly when that scrutiny might expose shortcomings in their own processes.

Khawaja was dropped in 2013 for failing to do his homework. Cricket Australia cannot now expect to mark its own homework.

Eight years on, we might never know what precisely happened in that Australian dressing room or around the boundary at Newlands. But that is no reason to stop asking questions or holding our heroes to account.

I still wish Khawaja’s Australian story wasn’t tainted by the timing of this interview. There are other issues that deserve more airtime, like challenging systemic biases in Australian pathways and allegations of racist abuse in the Lord’s Long Room. The boy from Islamabad who constantly fought his way into the Baggy Green, who scored those twin centuries at the SCG and who inspired a generation of cricketers who looked like him deserves to have his career remembered for so much more than this.

Usman certainly isn’t perfect, and it appears our sporting heroes very rarely are these days. But Australian cricket and the broader Australian public should be less concerned with why he chose to tell his story and more concerned with whether it is prepared to properly examine it.

The least those three sanctioned players, and the game itself, deserve is the truth.

Akshay Prasan is a Sydney-based final-year law student and NSW Premier Cricket player.

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