David Warner issues fresh statement on sandpaper saga, saying it ‘stinks of a cover-up’

Detailed summary

David Warner doubled down on his criticism of the investigation into the sandpaper saga, suggesting the bulk of Australia’s bowlers weren’t interviewed in the 2018 probe that he claims “stinks of a cover-up”.

David Warner has doubled down on his criticism of the investigation into the sandpaper saga, suggesting the bulk of Australia’s bowlers weren’t interviewed in the 2018 probe that he claims “stinks of a cover-up”.

In the latest development in a week that has seen the eight-year-old incident ignite a cricket civil war, Warner took to social media to question Cricket Australia’s position that the four main bowlers from that Cape Town Test match weren’t aware of the plan.

“As far as I am aware, CA did not interview Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc or Nathan Lyon in their 2018 investigation,” Warner wrote in an Instagram post.

“If that’s correct, then how can CA push the idea that the bowlers didn’t know?

“It looks like they had decided who they wanted to blame from the very beginning (and) ran a shoddy investigation to serve the purpose and now they want to maintain the false narrative that the bowlers had no idea.

The comments follow Warner’s words on Kayo Cricket in his role as an analyst on Friday, where he said Pat Cummins threw Usman Khawaja “under the bus” in his press conference that morning.

Warner’s claim suggests Cummins was the lone player out of the four main bowlers from the 2018 Test to be interviewed as part of the investigation that resulted in lengthy bans for the former opener, Steve Smith and Cam Bancroft.

Cummins on Friday described Usman Khawaja’s claims in his new book Sabr that the entire team knew of the sandpaper plot as “complete and utter nonsense”.

Saturday’s developments came as the ethics expert who ran a 2018 investigation into culture within the Australian cricket team said he had received a muted response from the team.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The West Australian. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.