Usman Khawaja claimed that he didn’t get Australia captaincy because of his skin colour. Pat Cummins denied the claim, asking him to provide evidence.
Australia’s Test and ODI captain Pat Cummins finally decided to bite the bullet as he called for a press conference to address the claims made by former teammate Usman Khawaja about the 2018 Sandpapergate scandal that rocked the country’s cricketing ecosystem. While Cummins admitted that he agreed with a lot of things that Khawaja wrote in his book ‘Sabr’, there were many things that he outright denied. One of the claims made by Khawaja that Cummins found the most outrageous was that Australia captaincy depended on the ‘colour of the player’s skin’.
Khawaja revealed in the book that he was upset when overlooked to be captain after then-skipper Steve Smith was sent home from Cape Town. Tim Paine got the job instead and was succeeded by Cummins in 2021.
“I was a natural selection for interim captain, but was overlooked,” said Khawaja, Australia’s first Pakistan-born national player who was leading the Queensland side in domestic cricket at the time.
He suggested that he was overlooked for the captain’s role in the national team also because of the fact that he had been a prominent protagonist during earlier pay disputes with Cricket Australia, and due to his heritage.
“The second — and, I believe, more important — reason was that they weren’t ready for a brown Australian cricket captain, even as an interim.”
Cummins said he did not agree with Khawaja’s rationale. He said: “I just don’t think that’s the case.”
“I think of the things I’ve read, that’s the most serious,” Cummins said at a press conference to address the ball-tampering allegations reignited by Khawaja. “To think that the job I hold is quarantined from people based on their skin colour, it’s a pretty big statement. If you are going to say that I think you have to have evidence. And I just don’t think that’s the case.
“Again, I agree with Usman on a lot of things but I disagree with him saying that if you’re Australian captain you have to be of a certain skin colour, I have to disagree with that statement.”