As Australia prepare to face South Africa in Test cricket for the first time since the 2018 ball-tampering scandal, more questions have been raised about the affair.
Veteran batsmen Usman Khawaja and Shaun Marsh both confirmed on Thursday they were not spoken to during the hastily conducted investigation into the use of sandpaper to alter the condition of the ball by Australian players during the Test at Newlands.
Usman Khawaja batting in the second Test against the West Indies last week.Credit:Getty Images
“I was not interviewed” Khawaja said before training ahead of the first Test against South Africa at the Gabba, beginning on Saturday. Asked if he was surprised, Khawaja replied: “At the time, yes.”
Fellow 2018 South African tourist Shaun Marsh confirmed on Thursday that he too was not included in the investigation.
“I wasn’t (interviewed) either,” Marsh told the Herald and The Age. “I was a little bit (surprised) at the time. That’s all I’ll say.”
Concerns have lingered that the investigation by Cricket Australia was far from comprehensive. Three players were sanctioned after the investigation: Steve Smith and David Warner, who were banned from cricket for one year, and Cameron Bancroft, who was banned for nine months. Smith and Warner were also banned from holding positions of leadership – Smith for a further 12 months, and Warner for life.
Warner’s manager, James Erskine, has consistently said more players were involved in the scandal than were implicated in the report.
Australian opener David Warner.Credit:Getty
“Everybody has been fiddling around with balls and the penalty at the time by the ICC [International Cricket Council] was a one-match ban,” Erskine said last week after Warner withdrew his application with CA for a review of his lifetime leadership ban.
“You’d have to be a blind, black Labrador [to not see] there were far more than three people involved in this thing. They all got a caning and David Warner was completely villainised.”
CA has refused to release the report of the investigation. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to be made public because the information was provided in confidence,” a CA spokesman told the Herald and The Age on Thursday.
Cameron Bancroft and Steve Smith face the media in Cape Town 2018.Credit:Getty Images
This is despite ushering in what appeared to be a new era of transparency for the governing body – Article 10 of the code of conduct was recently re-written to allow an independent panel to hold public hearings when reviewing code-of-conduct convictions and penalties.
The first hearing into Warner’s application for a reduction of his leadership ban was to have been held on Wednesday, but that was aborted when he withdrew from the process.
Warner was not happy at the prospect of having to again answer questions on the 2018 Cape Town scandal or that the media might have been allowed to cover all or part of the hearing when his application was only concerned with the length of the ban. He has never denied his guilt for his part in the incident.
Despite rewriting the code of conduct to encourage greater transparency, CA also opposed a decision by its independent code-of-conduct commissioner Alan Sullivan to open at least part of the Warner hearing.
Warner withdrew the application, accusing the three-man code-of-conduct commission panel of attempting to hold a “public lynching” and said he did not want to put his family or his teammates through any more “trauma”.
Khawaja believes the ugly behaviour from both sides that marred the 2018 tour was now a thing of the past.
“Obviously being part of that tour, I personally know we’re a very different Australian cricket team from what we were back then,” he said. “The way we go about it, the way we play.
“A lot of the guys over there have matured a lot, too, both as cricketers and humans. They’re a bit older, have a couple more kids, a lot of things have changed. We definitely play our cricket differently. I expect this series to be played in a lot better spirit, I kind of know it will be.”
Khawaja said it was up to South Africa to ensure their behaviour was also to an acceptable standard.
“We can only control what the Australian cricket team does,” he said. “I feel like the way we’ve played cricket over the last few years has been a representation of showcasing our skills and how well we’re playing, but also the way we’re playing.”
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