Add it to the immeasurable list of things that you can blame Covid for. Without the pandemic, Australia’s Test team would have headed to South Africa in February 2021, less than three years after the 2018 sandpaper scandal saw them come home from Johannesburg in disarray. With memories fresh, the attention would have been intense on the returning players: headlined by sacked captain Steve Smith, his replacement Tim Paine, and principal antagonist David Warner, with a support act of bowlers Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc.
At least, though, that prompt rematch would have lanced the boil of Australian cricket’s great modern humiliation, after Cameron Bancroft was caught sandpapering the match ball in the third Test at Cape Town. Instead, a lack of appetite for pandemic-era touring saw Cricket Australia cancel the 2021 tour before kicking a replacement years down the road, and while there have been white-ball trips in the interim, it has now taken eight years for an Australian Test return to supersede their ill-starred previous visit.
Eight years. Two Olympiads. Two Fifa World Cups. About 15 World Cups of various types in cricket. All this time later, the sandpaper story still dominates the lead-up to this series. Contributing to its presence is that, against the odds of sporting mortality, while Warner and Paine are long gone, Smith and all four bowlers remain.
The slew of retrospectives has understandably given rise to sandpaper fatigue, audiences tired of hearing about an old story before a new series, while others do historical revisions. Various pundits have suggested that the bans for the players involved were an overreaction, a position that has merit given the prevalence of ball-tampering in the sport, but ignores the press conference in which Smith and Bancroft foolishly lied to cover theirs up. Other observers have argued that whatever the details, the story is so old as to be dead. “What’s left to come out after eight years?” asked Starc this week.
The answer is everything, because nothing ever really has. Every player and staff member from 2018 publicly maintains the uncomfortable truce that was struck a few days in: that no Australian players had ball-tampered before that match, and that nobody knew beyond the three charged. A farcically shallow investigation allowed Cricket Australia (CA) to arrive at these most convenient conclusions and thus avoid looking further for anything less palatable.
This is why an old story remains live, twitching like a severed electrical cable. CA’s disciplinary report identified Warner as the instigator, Bancroft as the patsy, and Smith as the leader who failed to curtail them, but no player has ever acknowledged in plain language what actually happened, either on tour or that day. The closest was the 2021 statement from the four bowlers insisting that they didn’t know about the plan, but even then, they haven’t said who did. They haven’t said who didn’t. No player has said that any of the coaches knew, or didn’t know. Everyone has been politely vague to avoid the impression of finger-pointing, and hoped the story will go away.
Warner, meanwhile, has implied for years that he was hard done by. In the past week he has been busily back at it, with a range of social media posts and replies again trying to inject ambiguity into the idea that he was principally responsible. And yet, he continues to withhold any information that would back up that claim. His former teammates won’t name Warner, and Warner won’t name them. Stories only go away when we solve the mysteries of their plots, and the wait for this one goes on.
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As for what we know now, despite its ad nauseam nature, the sandpaper debacle may overall be something to be thankful for. Not in the case of Bancroft, the one player who truly lost, with an Australian career that never recovered and a domestic one that sputters like sleep apnoea. But it may have been good for the Australian team, knocking on the head the obsession with tough-bastard bluster that made previous champion sides so unlikeable.
Instead, there is now a tranche of players who, to foreign audiences steeped in the past, come across as disconcertingly affable. They may still attract angst for their performance, but less so for personality. England supporters did try raging at Cummins and Alex Carey after the Lord’s Test in 2023, but hating two of the most quietly decent characters in the game is a tough sell. On the field, decency has cost nothing in the way of results: keeping the Ashes in England twice, winning them in Australia twice, developing a compelling rivalry when India visit, Test series wins in four other countries, and pocketing two flavours of World Cup plus a Test Championship along the way.
The change in cultural style would not have been possible without the culture shock that preceded it, and the rare shared acknowledgment that the national team’s slate needed a damp cloth. With luck, after the callbacks demanded by the upcoming series, the sandpaper story can continue to recede, and the cultural gains that followed it can continue to be banked. Still, the players involved should know that truths don’t rest until their names are spoken. This story will stay alive for years more, unless it is finally put to sleep.