'It was all of us': Khawaja just ended the three-man Sandpapergate story

For eight years the official story of Cape Town 2018 has had three names in it: Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft. Two captains banned for a year, one opener for nine months, and everyone else in that dressing room left alone.

On Saturday Usman Khawaja told the Nine papers that the story was wrong. He was in that dressing room, and he sat next to Bancroft for the whole Test.

The book is called Sabr, which is Arabic for patience. It's out on Tuesday. Khawaja wrote it himself, with no ghostwriter, and he had already told Pat Cummins and CA chief executive Todd Greenberg what was in it. They knew it was coming. Now everyone else does too.

This isn't the first crack. In 2021 Bancroft told the Guardian it was "self-explanatory" that the bowlers knew what was happening to the ball. Within days, Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon put out a joint statement saying they had no idea a foreign substance was on the field until they saw the pictures on the big screen at Newlands.

Bancroft was easy to dismiss back then. He was one of the three who got punished, so of course he'd want company.

Khawaja is much harder to dismiss. He wasn't punished, he has retired, and he has nothing left to play for. He has also named a second Test. He says the sandpaper was used in Gqeberha, the Test before Cape Town, as well. That turns "one desperate afternoon" into a method. And a method is a lot harder to hide from the four men who were bowling with that ball.

To be fair, Khawaja hasn't said in these interviews that a particular bowler held the sandpaper. What he says is that people knew. But knowing is the very thing the 2021 statement denied.

The claim that does the most damage isn't about the bowlers. It's about the investigation.

Between the Cape Town and Johannesburg Tests, CA sent integrity head Iain Roy and team performance manager Pat Howard to South Africa to find out what happened. Khawaja says they never spoke to him, even though he was the player sitting next to the man with the sandpaper.

His explanation for why is pointed. He thinks they skipped him because they knew he would tell them the whole team should take responsibility.

Cricket Australia replied with a statement. It said there had been "ongoing opportunity" for anyone to bring forward information, that everything presented to it had been properly considered, and that it remains comfortable with the findings of its integrity process.

That's a careful answer, and it misses the point. Khawaja isn't saying CA ignored information he gave it. He's saying CA set up the investigation so it never had to hear it. "You could have come to us" doesn't answer "you didn't come to me."

Nobody at CA in 2018 is there now to defend it. Roy left three months later, Sutherland quit that same week after 17 years, and Howard was gone by November after a damning review of the team's culture. So CA is standing behind a process run by people it has already moved on from.

Khawaja says he expected someone else to tell this story by now, most likely Warner, his old opening partner. He talks about watching Warner "just get nailed bad over and over again" for eight years without hitting back. He also points out that Bancroft, despite years of runs in domestic cricket, never really got back into the Test side.

Steve Smith, he says, was "lucky". He was good enough to come back as the best batter of his generation. But Khawaja says Smith has never forgotten that year. The other two never got that chance to move on.

There's a twist, too. Khawaja says South Africa were "far better" at working on the ball than Australia were, and that Australia were "trying to keep up with them". The book apparently names details he heard from a South African player. That's sure to start a second argument, and it hands Faf du Plessis's old dressing room something to answer.

Cummins said last month that Australia had "moved on" and that he had answered every question about Sandpapergate "a million times". After Saturday, he'll be asked again. This time the question comes with a teammate's name on it.

The bowlers can keep denying it. CA can stay "comfortable". But the version where three bad apples acted alone now has a first-hand witness against it. The book comes out on Tuesday, and Khawaja has said there's more detail inside.

For eight years the punishment fell on three players. What Khawaja is asking now is simple: if everyone knew, why were only three of them punished?