Usman Khawaja has broken his silence after Australian Test captain Pat Cummins’ extraordinary rejection of sandpaper claims in his new book.
Cummins fronted an hour-long press conference on Friday, rebuking some of the accusations made in Khawaja’s autobiography Sabr, released last week.
While Khawaja has shifted back his media commitments in the wake of the initial storm following the release of his book, the former Test opener stood by what he published after being bailed up by The Australian at Sydney Airport.
“What I wrote in my book is what I wrote in my book and it’s the truth,” he said.
“That’s all I have to say.”
When The Australian asked if he was ‘lobbing a grenade and going silent’, Khawaja reaffirmed his support for WA batter Cameron Bancroft, one of the faces of the sandpaper saga.
“In the name of the great Cameron Bancroft, I’ve got nothing else to say,” Khawaja said.
Khawaja had not spoken publicly since Cummins’ extraordinary, lengthy press conference on Friday, where the Australian skipper labelled his former teammate’s claims as “complete and utter nonsense”.
Cummins had used the press conference to reject Khawaja’s views the entire Australian team knew sandpaper was being used in the field of play prior to Bancroft being caught on camera, illegally using a foreign object to rough up the ball.
“When he (Khawaja) says ‘we all knew’, if by that he means that we knew sandpaper was going out on the field, he is 100 per cent wrong,” Cummins said.
“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 I and others were architects of a scheme to ball-tamper with sandpaper. That’s complete and utter nonsense.”
Khawaja was put under the pump by journalist Sarah Ferguson on ABC’s 7.30 program on Monday, where he dodged and refused to answer certain questions around Cummins’ prior knowledge of the scandal.
