Two men, two diametrically opposite accounts. A choice must be made: Team Uzzie or Team Pat?

Oliver Brown

November 14, 2026 — 9:50am

Even after more than eight years, “sandpapergate” is the gift that keeps giving, the scandal that leaves an irreparable schism not just within a cricket team but an entire country.

As if those events in Cape Town in March 2018 were not lurid enough at the time, with the sight of Cameron Bancroft shoving sandpaper down his trousers a grievous wound to Australia’s sense of itself, Usman Khawaja’s claim that everybody knew about the plot to tamper with the ball has magnified the trauma.

The soap opera has spun so far out of control that professional lip-readers were asked this week to decode a film of Test captain Pat Cummins arguing with his wife Becky on a Sydney street. It is all supremely unedifying, and yet deliciously entertaining.

Cummins’ press conference on Friday dialled up the drama, shredding any remaining friendship with Khawaja as he called the retired opener’s accusation of a team conspiracy “100 per cent wrong” and “utter nonsense”.

The unburdening of his pent-up rage lasted 68 minutes and shone a light on his personality as never before. Occasionally too PR-friendly for some tastes, he excoriated Khawaja, telling him: “Friends aren’t casual with each other’s lives and reputations.”

Has there been a saga like it for raw emotion? In 2018, a disgraced Steve Smith dissolved in front of the cameras and had to be comforted by his father Peter. When an ashen-faced James Sutherland, then chief executive of Cricket Australia, delivered a statement in Melbourne condemning the players’ behaviour, tensions ran so high that two journalists present had a fight.

The difference with Cummins’ performance is that it has been hailed instantly in his homeland as a peace-in-our-time moment.

“Outstanding,” “vulnerable”, “credible” were just some of the snap verdicts Down Under. Oh, and “disgustingly handsome”.

The motivation for these cloying homilies appears to be twofold.

First, Cummins is such a gleaming Australian thoroughbred, both a devastating strike bowler and a part-time children’s author advocating the greater use of solar panels, that nothing can be allowed to besmirch his sheen of perfection.

Secondly, the idea that he is not telling the truth – that he, and the rest of a brilliant bowling attack, were in on the dastardly scheme from the start – is almost too much for the national psyche to bear.

There is evident desperation in Australia to believe Cummins’ version over Khawaja’s. Just look at their respective media appearances this week: where Khawaja received a thorough grilling on the ABC’s 730 current affairs show, Cummins left his audience at Sydney’s Olympic Park in such raptures that he was practically carried out on a sedan chair.

Two men, two diametrically opposite accounts of what happened. And so, the logical extension is that somebody is lying, that a choice must be made as to who to trust. Team Uzzie or Team Pat?

The ecstatic notices of the past 24 hours prove Australians are in the captain’s corner, prepared to take his every heartfelt comment at face value and to let the infernal matter rest.

All very convenient, very fickle. The problem is the central question – how the bowlers in Cape Town could possibly have been oblivious to the altered ball condition – is left hanging.

In 2021, Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon issued a joint statement to declare that the first they knew of sandpaper being on the field was when they saw it on the big screen.

“We respectfully request an end to the rumour-mongering and innuendo,” they said.

“It has gone on too long and it is time to move on.”

Except their own team-mate seemed not to receive the memo, with Khawaja waiting a further five years to argue in his memoir Sabr, that the Australian dressing room needed to accept collective responsibility for the scam. Promoting the book, he said: “Am I going to deny that everyone knew? Nah.”

Unsurprisingly, David Warner, Khawaja’s close friend and a man banned for 12 months for his part in it, wasted no time in endorsing this portrayal. And when Cummins contradicted it, he gravely concluded the captain had “thrown Uzzie under the bus”.

The trouble is Khawaja has hardly gone out of his way to present himself as a reliable narrator. He went to pieces under tough interrogation by 730 host Sarah Ferguson, seeking refuge in such vacuous Meghan Markle-isms as “my truth” and “safe space”, before cancelling the rest of his scheduled broadcast appearances.

While he is fond of throwing grenades – remember his allegation that he had been treated differently during the last Ashes series as a “coloured cricketer”? – he is not the best at providing concrete proof.

He again pushes the politics of grievance in his book, insisting he lost out to Smith for the Test captaincy on the grounds of race. Even Cummins, once so indulgent of Khawaja that he stopped Australia’s players from spraying champagne so as not to offend a teetotal Muslim, was unimpressed. “If you’re going to say that, you’ve got to have some evidence, and I just don’t think that is the case,” he said.

It all leaves Australia’s cricket community in quite the quandary.

You can see their dilemma a mile off: on the one hand, they want to circle the wagons around the golden boy Cummins, and on the other, they are terrified of suggesting any malign motives for distrusting Khawaja.

To cap it all, Warner’s book is due out before long, all but guaranteeing the whole sorry mess will be relitigated once more.

For a once great Test team, it is a nightmare without end. For everybody else, it is just about the juiciest Ashes prelude possible.

The Telegraph, London

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