Cummins dismisses Khawaja’s ball-tampering claims

An impassioned Pat Cummins has labelled Usman Khawaja’s ball-tampering claims as "flippant" and "irresponsible", with Australia’s Test captain repeating his position that he had no knowledge of the 2018 sandpaper plot and that there was no "master plan" to use underhand methods to gain reverse swing during that tour of South Africa.

Cummins took the extraordinary step of holding an all-in press conference at Cricket NSW’s Silverwater headquarters on Friday, addressing reporters for over an hour to confront the ruckus over an eight-year-old ball-tampering scandal reignited by fresh claims made in Khawaja’s recently published autobiography, Sabr.

"I’ll stay here until you have no more questions. I don’t want to talk about this again after today," said the 33-year-old who was playing his 13th Test when the Cape Town fiasco occurred.

Cummins revealed he had previously witnessed a New South Wales teammate using a bottle cap to scratch a ball in a Sheffield Shield match, while he said the use of sandpaper on training balls (along with rubbing them on concrete or using a Stanley knife) was common to simulate natural reverse swing in the nets.

He also expressed his view that the punishments handed out to Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith and David Warner for respective roles in the Cape Town plot were “way too heavy-handed”; that “shenanigans” around gaining reverse swing abounded in international cricket at the time; and that the 2018 affair came during a series pervaded by a sense of "lawlessness" amid several other incidents of poor behaviour.

But he forcefully denied that, as Khawaja has written and reiterated in an interview to promote his memoir, that the entire Australian team and support staff knew they were illegally tampering with the ball during the third Test against the Proteas at Newlands in 2018.

Cummins also said it had been "news to me" that Australia had used sandpaper on the ball in the second Test against South Africa in 2018 in Port Elizabeth (now Gqberha) on the edge of the field at the start of a session, as Khawaja alleged.

"When he says ‘We all knew’, if by that he means that we knew sandpaper was going out in the field, he’s 100 per cent wrong," said Cummins. "I’ve said that consistently for the last eight years. I did not know that was happening.

"But I think Usman actually says things that are actually far more serious than that. He says that I and others were architects of a scheme to ball tamper with sandpaper. That’s complete and utter nonsense.

"I was genuinely shocked this week when I found out that Usman admitted that he told Cam to be careful when using sandpaper (in Cape Town).

"That’s not the Usman that I know. It’s not the Usman that has been part of a team that’s helped rebuild the Australian cricket culture over the last eight years. The Usman that would have stopped that from happening there and then. 

"Usman’s a friend, but friends aren’t casual with each other’s lives and reputations. In his book, Uzzie has been casual with my life, and the lives of many others, and I think Australian cricket.

"… This really affects Australian cricket. The way that he’s presented his story. I think he’s done that in a very casual manner, and it affects a lot of people. That’s what I’m grappling with at the moment because I don’t think it’s okay.

"… Usman is a friend, but I, you know, I think the way he’s kind of been quite casual and flippant with people’s lives in Australian cricket, I don’t think that’s okay, and I don’t think that’s what friends do."

Cummins refuted Khawaja’s suggestion the batter had advocated for the entire team taking collective responsibility for the Cape Town plot, or that the team’s bowlers would necessarily be aware of tampering if it occurred.

"There was a lot of pressure around reverse swing back in that series, and even sometimes Test cricket around then," said Cummins, of whose leadership Khawaja speaks glowingly in his book.

"…There was no master plan around using illegal methods. I think that’s maybe something that hasn’t been spoken about enough.

"People assume you’ve gone from very legal methods to suddenly taking sandpaper (on the field) and there must have been some huge master plan. The truth is that is not the case … there was no grand plan. There was no team meeting. There was no bowlers saying, ‘this is what must happen’. There were natural progressions that get you there. 
"… at no time did I hear 'here's an illegal method, let’s make sure we do this when we go out on the field'."

Cummins spoke at length about the various methods he was aware of other teams used to get reverse swing, which included the use of superglue, nail polish, certain brands of mints to change players’ saliva content and sandpaper.

Lifting the quarter seam on the rough side of the ball was another, something he believes, in retrospect, he witnessed prior to the 2018 South Africa tour.

"There’ve been previous times which I thought was normal (deterioration), which I’m starting to think it’s less normal now because I haven’t seen it a long time, where maybe the quarter seems a little bit higher than it should be," he said.

"Maybe someone’s just tried to lift it up a tiny bit with a finger. I’ve not seen that since then. But at the time coming back into the team after not much cricket, I was I thought that was very normal."

Cummins said the only time he had witnessed illegal tampering in a match he was playing in on was in the Sheffield Shield “sometime before that South Africa tour”.

"It was a batter, it was a senior player – I won’t mention him – but he took a bottle cap out on the field. That was the one time I’ve seen it on the field,” said Cummins.

“I was looking, going, ‘Wow, that’s not okay.’ It was dealt with, the umpires knew it as well. They called him out and said, ‘You got to stop that right now’. That’s the only time I’ve seen something illegal out there."

Cummins said it was "up to CA" whether that another investigation into the 2018 affair was worthwhile. Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg told radio station SEN earlier this week that the organisation would not re-open one.

"Part of why I think this is still lingering after eight years is there’s a lot of context around this, which is hard to explain and hard to articulate, and that’s what I want to do today," Cummins said.

"But there’s a very proper way to do things and an improper (way), and I think that investigation was the proper way to do it. Everyone was asked in the circumstances with a game very quickly after (the fourth Test in Johannesburg).

"So that’s for CA. I think you can maybe argue whether the judgments were fair, but what (more) can you do? I got asked all the questions, answered them all fairly."

Cummins did concede the culture of that 2018 team “had a win at all costs mentality, had an ugly underbelly, and there was too many silos within the team”, elements of the dressing room that he has "tried very hard to eradicate for the last (five) years as captain."

"My memories of coming back into that side was there was parts that I didn’t really think was okay," said Cummins, who had been plagued by injuries and limited to white-ball cricket at international level until 2017 before establishing himself as a regular in the Test side.

"I thought the way we acted on the field was quite abrasive. Didn’t like some of the way we spoke to umpires, the opposition. I think there was a bit of an arrogance and a bit of an ugliness at times that just didn’t really sit well with me as a young guy.

"And now that I’m captain, I’ve spent a lot of time making sure that that’s not the case with this current Aussie team, and I think we’ve been absolutely brilliant since 2018."