‘A nightmare for Pat Cummins’: Why Khawaja claims are set to dog Australia captain

November 8, 2026 — 6:02pm

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Among all the claims Usman Khawaja has published in the past few days – in his upcoming book and on his Instagram page – one was conspicuously wide of the mark.

“I was always conscious of putting my team first, but I’m not in that team any more,” Khawaja said in a video on Sunday morning. “Now, my words don’t influence the team at all.”

Khawaja may no longer be a part of the Australian set-up, having retired from international cricket after the Ashes in January this year. But the Test team gearing up for the summer opener against New Zealand on December 9 features a number of players from that infamous 2018 series, including captain Pat Cummins.

And as former Australian captain Mark Taylor put it on Sunday: “It’s going to be obviously a nightmare for Pat Cummins and the team leading into the summer of cricket.”

Normally, players bristle when the media brings up past controversies. This time, it is a former teammate who has reopened one of Australian cricket’s deepest wounds.

If Khawaja felt the full story of “Sandpapergate”, the Australian ball-tampering scandal in 2018, had to be told, there were other ways to bring it into the public domain than through a publicity blitz while promoting a book from which he hopes to profit. That is the feeling of some influential figures in cricket across the country who have spoken to this masthead.

After a weekend of headlines, explosive extracts and increasingly pointed responses, we still have not........

© The Age