David Warner has accused Cricket Australia of a "cover-up" in its investigation of the 2018 ball-tampering scandal, BBC Sport reported, after batter Usman Khawaja wrote in a new autobiography that the entire Australia team knew about the use of sandpaper in a Test series in South Africa. Warner, who served a lengthy ban along with then-captain Steve Smith and opener Cameron Bancroft, said he was not aware that Cricket Australia had interviewed Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc or Nathan Lyon. "If that's correct, then how can CA push the idea that the bowlers didn't know?" Warner said. "It looks like they had decided who they wanted to blame from the very beginning, ran a shoddy investigation to serve the purpose and now they want to maintain the false narrative that the bowlers had no idea. That stinks of a cover-up."
The four frontline bowlers — Hazlewood, Starc, Lyon and Pat Cummins — have maintained they did not know about the plan. Cummins, Australia's Test captain since 2021, said at a Friday news conference that he was interviewed as part of the investigation and that suggestions the entire team knew were "100% wrong" and "utter nonsense." After that appearance, Warner said: "I stick with Uzzie. It's the truth. The captain threw Uzzie under the bus. I feel it was a botched investigation." Khawaja also said he was not interviewed, despite sitting next to Bancroft, the player seen with sandpaper on the field, in the dressing room.
Cricket Australia replied that "all players were given the opportunity to speak at the time of the initial investigation and have had the ability to come forward with new evidence in the eight years since. Subsequently, CA has respected every player and former players' right to provide their own version of events." The board has said it will not reopen the investigation. Warner's remarks are a new public accusation, not a court finding, and they come as a follow-up to Khawaja's book and to Cummins's denial, not as a fresh on-field incident.
The verified news is Warner's "cover-up" claim, his statement that three bowlers were not interviewed, Cummins's insistence that he was interviewed and that a whole-team plot is "utter nonsense," and Cricket Australia's refusal to reopen the case. It is not proof that the 2018 inquiry was a cover-up, and it is not a new ban or a reopened formal investigation. Warner has been steadfast in his public defense of Khawaja since the autobiography appeared last week, and the dispute is now about what the 2018 investigation did or did not ask, not about a new on-field offense.