Lehmann's Sandpapergate defence: 'books are there to sell' isn't a denial

This week Usman Khawaja told the Nine papers that the whole Australian dressing room knew about the sandpaper at Newlands in 2018. Batters, bowlers and staff alike. We covered it here: 'It was all of us'.

On Saturday the man who ran that dressing room replied. Darren Lehmann, Australia's head coach on that tour, now coaches Northamptonshire and works as a commentator for the ABC. He went on ABC's Grandstand and gave his first answer to the claims.

His headline line was a denial. Just about everything after it was a shrug.

Straight after that line, Lehmann said you do know ball-tampering is going on, because it has been "happening for 150 years". The open question, as he put it, was only how it was being done and how much the bowlers and other players knew.

So the defence isn't "nobody knew". It's "everyone was at it, but maybe not everyone knew the details". That is a much smaller claim than the 2018 story, which was three players and one desperate afternoon.

He went further, too. He called ball-tampering a "big part" of international cricket until after that 2018 series. Then he said it is "obsolete" now, and that this "doesn't make it right either". For a man who quit as coach before the Johannesburg Test, that's a lot to concede.

Look closely at the table. Lehmann gives one firm denial and one admission. On every specific detail, he says he doesn't know or doesn't remember.

Take the Bancroft conversation. Khawaja says Bancroft was talking to a coach shortly before the TV cameras picked up the sandpaper on day three. Lehmann says that coach wasn't him and he didn't know about the conversation. Then he added that he "probably should have known". From a head coach, that line is closer to a confession about his own oversight than a defence.

On the speech, he said there were two changing rooms and meetings going on everywhere, and that he was often with Cricket Australia. "That could have been the case," he said. That isn't a man saying Khawaja made it up.

That's the line that will travel. Lehmann wondered aloud how much Khawaja is being paid, asked whether it was worth it, and joked that maybe he'll write a book himself. He also said that some things "are left unsaid sometimes for the good of the game".

That last line is the most revealing thing he said. You only leave something unsaid if there was something to say.

The money jab is also weak on the facts. Khawaja wrote Sabr himself, without a ghostwriter. He has retired, so he has no selection to lose. And he warned Pat Cummins and CA chief executive Todd Greenberg before any of it went public. Selling a book doesn't make something untrue. The question is whether it's right, and Lehmann hasn't actually said it's wrong.

To be fair to Lehmann, the interview wasn't all deflection. He talked openly about what 2018 cost him. He said the team had apologised to "26 million people", that he needed a lot of help away from cricket afterwards, and that going back over it "puts you back in a bad place".

That's real, and it explains why someone who was there would rather the story stayed buried. But it doesn't settle what happened in that dressing room. Neither does "no individual is bigger than the game".

Lehmann had a chance to call Khawaja wrong. He didn't. He said he doesn't think everyone knew, that tampering was everywhere anyway, and that he can't speak for the players.

That last point is now the key one. The players are next. Mitchell Marsh, who played in that Cape Town XI and is captaining Australia's ODI side against England, faces the media in Perth on Thursday. Steve Smith is due back for NSW in the Sheffield Shield on November 22. The book is out on Tuesday.

The 2018 version had three guilty men and a coach who didn't know. After Saturday, the coach is still saying he didn't know. He's just no longer saying it was only three.