The man who reviewed Australia's culture now says he may have been lied to

Every defence of the 2018 settlement has leaned on one idea: Australian cricket was examined, top to bottom, and it changed. On Wednesday the man who did the examining said something awkward about that.

Simon Longstaff led The Ethics Centre's cultural review after South Africa. In a column for the Australian Financial Review, he pointed out that his terms of reference "explicitly excluded any investigation of the specific events" that started the inquiry. Cricket Australia had already investigated those, and closed them.

So the famous review was a review of culture, carried out by people who were told not to ask what actually happened. Hold that thought.

Longstaff says he went back to some of the people he had interviewed and gave them the chance to change their statements. They didn't. He was met with "explicit denials that there was anything more to be said". He is bound by confidentiality and won't name anyone.

This is the sharpest turn of the week. Starc's line, "we weren't aware", is about memory. Longstaff's is about the record. If Khawaja's account of Port Elizabeth holds up, the people who denied it to Longstaff didn't just misremember. They misled a formal review.

That's the difference between an old story coming back and a new one starting. Cricket Australia's "no compelling reason" to reopen gets a lot harder to defend when its own reviewer says the record may be false.

Then came the grudge match. Chris Broad, father of Stuart, took Lehmann back to the 2013 Ashes: Stuart edged at Trent Bridge, stood his ground, was given not out, and Lehmann said Australia would "make him cry" next time.

Broad's point: the coach who took the moral high ground over one edge then ran a dressing room where sandpaper went onto the field. Brutal, and personal.

The twist is who agreed. David Warner, banned for a year over Cape Town, replied on X: "I couldn't agree more and that's hard for me to say!" Warner siding with a Broad against his own former coach tells you how far this has moved. The 2018 group isn't one group any more.

Khawaja's book also says Australia lifted the quarter seam in the 2017-18 Ashes, and that "the whole world was doing whatever little they could" for reverse swing. Asked if every side was tampering back then, Joe Root gave the only line England need: "I can only speak from my own experiences and that's not how I feel, no."

At the MCG, Peter Handscomb made a century for Victoria and politely said no. He was a reserve on the day Bancroft was caught, the man Lehmann sent onto the field with the walkie-talkie message. He'd "had a nice day" and would "let the powers of people do their thing".

His best line was honest: he hasn't called any of his old team-mates, but "I'm sure their phones are probably going mental anyway."

England arrive in Perth for the first ODI on Friday almost unnoticed, which suits them. Root will play his 200th ODI there, only the third England player to get there, with 8010 runs at 50.37 and a strike rate of 87.81. In a normal week that's the story.

This is not a normal week. Khawaja is in Sydney selling the book after a tense ABC 7.30 interview. Mitchell Marsh, who played on the 2018 tour, faces the media on Thursday. Cummins still hasn't spoken.

The players keep saying "move on". But Longstaff's column changes what moving on means. It's no longer about whether to dig up 2018. It's about whether the official account of 2018 was true. Cricket Australia can ignore an author selling a book. It can't easily ignore its own reviewer saying he may have been lied to.