‘So we finally now know the most hidden secret in the game’ – Michael Vaughan thrashes Australia after Usman Khawaja’s sandpapergate revelation

Former England captain Michael Vaughan posted a pointed reaction on X after Usman Khawaja publicly claimed that every member of the Australian squad was aware of the ball-tampering plot during the Cape Town Test in March 2018. The post drew immediate attention given the weight of Khawaja’s assertion and the eight years that had passed since the original scandal.

The tone was sardonic throughout, with Vaughan treating the revelation as something that had long been suspected rather than genuinely surprising.

“So we finally now know the most hidden secret in the game … all the Aussie team knew about the sandpaper … 8 yrs later it all comes out … no sh*t Sherlock … now can we just move on …” Vaughan wrote via his official X handle.

Khawaja’s claims, made ahead of the release of a forthcoming book, were reported on November 6, 2026. The former Australian opener stated that the ball-tampering tactic was not limited to Cape Town and had also been employed during the preceding Test at Port Elizabeth. He attributed the episode to a ‘win at all costs’ mentality that had built up over seven years and had made the rest of the cricket world hostile towards Australia.

Khawaja was direct in placing collective responsibility on the squad. He told Nine newspapers: ‘It was all of us. All of us.’ That statement sits at the centre of the renewed debate around sandpapergate and is what prompted Vaughan’s public response.

Sandpapergate: the original bans and the renewed scrutiny

However, a complicating voice has also emerged. Bill Anderson, Khawaja’s childhood coach, told Australian Story that Khawaja had tried to persuade his former teammates to collectively acknowledge their awareness of the plot, but that some of them refused to go along with that account. Anderson said: ‘Usman actually tried to coerce them all to say ‘we all knew what was going on’ and some of them wouldn’t buy into that.’ That counterclaim adds a layer of dispute to Khawaja’s ‘all of us’ assertion.

The original sandpapergate scandal broke during the Cape Town Test in March 2018. Cameron Bancroft was found to have used sandpaper to alter the condition of the ball. The fallout was severe: then-captain Steve Smith and his deputy David Warner each received one-year bans from international and domestic cricket, while Bancroft was suspended for nine months. Cricket Australia subsequently launched a review of the team’s broader culture.

The question of how many players were aware of the plot had surfaced before Khawaja’s latest claims. Bancroft had previously indicated that Australian bowlers in the squad may have had some knowledge of what was happening. Following those earlier comments, Cricket Australia said it was open to a re-investigation and that its integrity team had already made contact with Bancroft.