ConfirmedSport · Australia

Khawaja: Entire Australia team knew about ball-tampering scandal

First reported 2026-11-06 21:10 UTC · Updated 2026-11-07 13:50 UTC · 6 independent sources

What happened

Former Australia opener Usman Khawaja says everyone in the team's dressing room knew about the ball-tampering plot at the 2018 Cape Town Test against South Africa.

He made the claim in extracts of his autobiography 'Sabr', published by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Khawaja also says sandpaper was used in the Test before Cape Town, and that tampering talks began in the dressing room at Port Elizabeth.

The four bowlers in that match, among them current Test captain Pat Cummins, said in a joint statement in 2021 that they knew nothing of any foreign substance on the field.

Former coach Darren Lehmann, who resigned in tears after the scandal, said he does not think everyone would have known.

“It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us.”

Sky Sports

Summary written by AI from 3 independent sources (Sky Sports, BBC, Guardian) and checked automatically against them for copied text and numbers that are not in the sources. How we work

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Who reported it

  1. 2026-11-06 21:10 UTCSky Sports · skysports.com ↗
  2. 2026-11-06 22:06 UTCBBC · bbc.co.uk ↗
  3. 2026-11-06 23:35 UTCGuardian · theguardian.com ↗
  4. 2026-11-07 01:39 UTCArab News · arabnews.com ↗
  5. 2026-11-07 05:46 UTCAl Jazeera · aljazeera.com ↗
  6. 2026-11-07 13:50 UTCCyprus Mail · cyprus-mail.com ↗

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