David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft were welcomed back into the Test team for the 2019 Ashes. (Getty Images: Nick Potts/PA Images)
All players and staff knew about the ball tampering during the infamous 2018 Cape Town Test, Usman Khawaja has told Nine newspapers ahead of the release of his book.
In an explosive claim in his new book Sabr, Khawaja says sandpaper was also used in the previous Test in Port Elizabeth, now known as Gqeberha.
"It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us," Khawaja told Nine newspapers.
The claim is at odds with Cricket Australia's assertion that only Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith and David Warner knew about the tactic. Bowlers Pat Cummins, Mitch Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon also denied publicly in 2021 that they knew about it.
Bancroft was banned for nine months after being caught using sandpaper on the ball during the third Test of the series in South Africa, while captain Smith and vice-captain Warner copped 12-month bans for their parts in the scheme.
In the book, Khawaja claims that lighthearted discussions about the use of sandpaper at St George's Park led to Smith walking out of the rooms and saying that he didn't want to know about it.
He claims Bancroft then volunteered to use sandpaper in the first innings at Gqeberha, where the ball swung significantly, and that he sat next to Bancroft at Newlands and saw who spoke to the young batter during the Test that would see the Australian team caught out.
Khawaja has been promoting his book across various media outlets over the past weeks. However, the claims made in the ball tampering chapters had been redacted until today. He said he had dedicated the chapter to Bancroft, Warner and Smith because he had seen how the saga had weighed on all three players.
Khawaja told ABC Radio National's Conversations program that revisiting the 2018 series for the book was particularly difficult.
"Everyone in that team, one way or another, was affected and we still are affected by that to this day," he said.
"For me, writing that chapter was more about what I thought was the right thing to do. … I still struggle to talk about it in a lot of respects. There's no easy way to talk about what happened over there. There's no easy way to write about that period of Cricket Australia and that period of my life.
"It's just about telling my story. and what my feelings were particularly at that time and what I saw."
Khawaja said it was a culmination of seven years of playing with a "win at all costs" mentality that made the rest of the cricket world hate them.
He said that started after the 2011 Argus Review, which came in the wake of the team's first home Ashes series loss in 24 years, during which Khawaja made his Test debut as England won by an innings and 83 runs to complete a dominant 3-1 series victory.
"The way we were playing, we were disrespecting other players and I talked to other players in other teams I was friends with and they were just like 'yeah, we hate your boys'," he said.
"This all manifested during that time with sandpaper, and no-one had our backs after that either because why would they? We just acted like idiots for the last seven years."
Khawaja's childhood coach and mentor, Bill Anderson, told Australian Story last month: "Usman actually tried to coerce them all to say 'we all knew what was going on' and some of them wouldn't buy into that. Ussie's view being, 'they're not going to sack us all'."
The 39-year-old told Conversations that if he could have his time over again, he would have stood his ground more resolutely.
The silver lining of the whole affair, Khawaja said, was that it forced the Australian men's team to have a long, hard look at its playing style.
"The best things come out of the worst times. I genuinely believe, for the Australian cricket team, the best thing that came out of Sandpaper is we found humility again," he said.
"JL [Justin Langer] came in as coach and he was honestly probably the best coach we could've had at that time. He put humility back in the Australian cricket team.
"It was just lovely to see. It was beautiful. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed seeing where the Australian team went from that point onwards and obviously Pat Cummins, who ended up becoming the captain, was a part of that process and journey."