Usman Khawaja remained silent for eight years. Why did he speak out now?

November 7, 2026 — 1:09pm

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Australian cricket has itself to blame for the eight-year suppurating wound that has been reopened by Usman Khawaja’s memories of the South African tour of 2018.

It bled in 2021 when Cameron Bancroft gave the interview that sealed his fate as an Australian representative.

David Warner and his manager periodically reopened it. Left unhealed, it was always ready for a new bleed.

If they’re looking for their beloved “learnings”, Cricket Australia, and Australia’s Test players, might look back to their failure in 2018 to honestly and broadly tell the truth about what happened at Newlands and on that tour.

Their window of opportunity for truth-telling lasted about a day, when they could have accepted collective responsibility and tried to bring the rest of the cricket world with them.

Instead, they attempted to ring-fence the blame around Bancroft, Warner and Steve Smith, to punish those players and hope the heaviness of those punishments would be a substitute for treating the wound.

As any battlefield surgeon could have told them, all they were doing was creating the conditions for a long-term recurrent infection.

Their missteps started, but never........

© WA Today