Khawaja's book leaves Sandpapergate and walks into the Long Room. Lord's should be more worried

For a week Usman Khawaja's autobiography Sabr has been about sandpaper. Warner backed it, Cricket Australia shrugged at it, Starc sidestepped it.

Now the book has moved to London. Khawaja alleges that an MCC member in the Lord's Long Room told him to "shut up, you P**i" on day five of the 2023 Ashes Test, in the storm after Jonny Bairstow's stumping.

Sandpapergate is a story about a team lying about a cricket ball. This one is about what a brown man in a baggy green heard on the walk to lunch, at the most prestigious club in the game. It is not the same size of story.

We all saw the footage. Sky Sports showed Khawaja stopping to confront a member as the Australians were booed back to the pavilion, stopping again to point a second member out to stewards, then heading up the stairs.

At the time he called it "really disappointing" and "pretty disrespectful". That was the whole public record for three years. The book fills in the audio.

He describes the members as "a pack of privileged drunks", with only a rope and about 20 centimetres between the players and the people shouting at them. He writes that it was "like a pack of dogs" and that he first laughed, out of shock.

His sharpest line is a comparison. Was this the Long Room, with a waiting list of over 30 years, or the Hollies, Edgbaston's party stand? "No disrespect to the Hollies," he adds, "because they never treated us like this." That's a sentence MCC will not enjoy reading.

This is where Khawaja is more careful than most memoirs. He writes that he does not know exactly who used the slur. He confronted the first man he saw, the one "still shouting, spitting and screaming" in his face, and told security to get him out.

He also alleges that another member tried to trip him and David Warner on the stairs, and that he played the whole thing down to Australia's security manager Frank Dimasi so it would not become a "distraction" while they pushed for the win.

Think about that for a second. A player is racially abused, and his first instinct is to protect the team's focus on day five. That says plenty about what players of colour have learned to absorb.

MCC declined to comment, but pointed to how seriously it took the matter at the time and how severe the punishments were. Fair enough: one expulsion and two multi-year bans is not a slap on the wrist.

Here's the part nobody will lead with. When MCC chair Mark Nicholas later asked Khawaja for his view on the bans, he said the members deserved another chance if they had learned and were remorseful.

That is not a man writing a book for revenge. It's a man who wants the incident on the record and the people in it given a way back. Those two things can sit together, and he is showing how.

The cost wasn't only his. He writes that his wife Rachel was "scared sitting in the stands" and that his brother-in-law "nearly got into a punch-up" with an England fan. A crowd he called "hysterical" before lunch and "drunk and angry" after it.

Cricket Australia can tell itself Sandpapergate is old news. Lord's cannot do the same here, because this is not about 2018 rules or 2023 tactics. It is about who gets to feel safe in cricket's most famous room.

The MCC punished three members in 2023, and that deserves credit. But until now the public never knew the word that was used. Now it does, and "we dealt with it" will need a sharper answer.

The bigger point: Khawaja kept quiet for three years to protect a dressing room and a run chase. He spoke now because he is retired and owes nobody a quiet afternoon. The question for cricket is how many players are still on the other side of that rope, waiting until they retire.