Australia used sandpaper even before 2018? Former Aussie spinner Stuart Macgill reveals how he used to rough up balls during matches
· Yahoo Sports
Australia used sandpaper even before 2018? Former Aussie spinner Stuart Macgill reveals how he used to rough up balls during matches originally appeared on Cricket News. Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Visit rouesnews.click for more information.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Former Aussie spinner Stuart MacGill has opened up about some surprising tricks from his playing days.
- Sandpaper on his thumb helped him change the condition of the ball.
- His comments raise fresh questions about how new the 2018 Cape Town scandal really was.
MORE: Khawaja autobiography highlights: All major talking points from 'Sabr'
'Scratched the daylights out of it!': Stuart MacGill drops shocking sandpaper confession
Was sandpaper part of Australian cricket long before the 2018 Cape Town scandal shocked the sporting world? Former Test spinner Stuart MacGill has now offered his own account of life on the field in an earlier era, and it makes for rather uncomfortable reading for those who believed the issue began and ended with one infamous afternoon.
MacGill played 44 Tests for Australia between 1998 and 2008, picking up 208 wickets at an average of 29.02. He was widely regarded as one of the most prolific strike bowlers of his generation, and his career ran alongside that of the great Shane Warne.
The incidents he described belong to the late 1990s and 2000s, which is well before the March 2018 episode in Cape Town that led to 12-month bans for Steve Smith and David Warner and a nine-month ban for Cameron Bancroft.
MORE: Steyn spots irony in Khawaja's Sandpapergate revelation as Broad joins in mocking AUS
Stuart MacGill sandpaper admission: How he scratched the ball on his thumb
The host got straight to the point and asked whether MacGill had ever used sandpaper. The former leg-spinner did not hesitate, and he went on to explain a clever routine that relied on a small habit of the umpires.
During breaks, the match ball would be placed roughly 20 metres beyond the boundary rope, and a fielder would run out to collect it before play resumed.
MORE: Usman Khawaja reveals why he waited until retirement to expose Sandpapergate
MacGill saw an opportunity in that short run. He fixed a small square of sandpaper to his thumb, picked up the ball after the tea interval, roughed it up and then ripped the paper off before dropping it into the gutter. By the time the first delivery of the session was bowled, no trace of the paper remained.
“I’ve used it. What they would do is the umpires, as you’re walking out on the ground, they used to put the ball, sort of about 20 metres over the boundary and leave it there, and you’d run out onto the field, pick it up and go on the field," MacGill said on the Fanaticspodcast.
“I taped a little square of sandpaper on my thumb, picked the ball up just after tea, scratched the living daylights out of it, pulled the sandpaper off, chucked it in the gutter before a ball had even been bowled. So nobody even knew that I’d done it, apart from all the scratches on the ball!”
Not every experiment went to plan, however. MacGill admitted that he tried a few other ideas as well, including one that ended in a rather funny failure.
“I also tried a couple of other things. I sewed a piece of sandpaper inside my trousers one time, but unfortunately that got a hole in my strides, so...” he said.
MORE: 'Haven’t paid much attention': Starc denies Khawaja's allegation
The SCG Swans race trick: How a full toss helped roughen the ball for reverse swing
The third story took place at the Sydney Cricket Ground, where MacGill usually bowled from the Paddington End.
He explained that a waist-high full toss was a deliberate tactic because it invited the batter to hook or pull the ball in the direction of the Swans race, the tunnel gate at the ground.
Whenever the ball ended up there, the fielder who went to collect it would drag it along the wall on his way back, and that scraping could rough up one side of it to help reverse swing. The mark left behind was clearly visible to anyone who looked closely.
“I used to bowl from the Paddington end. If I bowled a waist-high full toss, it was an opportunity for the batsman just to swing me straight down the Swans race. On the occasion that the ball did actually go down there, the fieldsman would walk back up scraping the ball against the wall. There was a big red stripe on the wall!” he said.
At one point the host teased MacGill with a quip about a fielder wandering around at deep backward square, and the answer opened up the bigger debate.
MacGill brought up Darren Lehmann, the former teammate who later became Australia’s coach, and said he believes that the practice has been around since the earliest days of Test cricket.
“You know, Boof (Lehmann) reckons it’s been happening since day one in Test cricket, and I think it probably has been. Because we know that everybody’s doing it, it doesn’t feel so bad. Like if I’m playing against South Africa, I know that they’ve done everything that I’ve done, so I don’t feel bad about it,” he said.
In 2018, Cricket Australia presented the sandpaper incident as an unprecedented act devised by Warner and Bancroft, but MacGill’s story points to the use of sandpaper by an Australian player almost two decades earlier, at least in his own case.
It also lines up with recent remarks from Usman Khawaja, who claimed in his autobiography Sabr that manipulating the ball was routine in the Sheffield Shield and that “it was all of us” in 2018.
Stuart Broad's father, Chris Broad and David Warner have also recently been critical of Lehmann’s public stance of innocence, which makes the new comments even more relevant.
MacGill’s confession shows why the ball-tampering debate is far from over
MacGill’s story is entertaining on the surface, but it should also make cricket think hard about its own history. A thumb covered in sandpaper, a patch stitched into trousers and a scraped ball in the SCG tunnel are not accidental acts.
They were planned ideas, and the former spinner describes them with the ease of someone who thought it was part of the job.
The most worrying part is the “everybody’s doing it” argument. It may feel natural inside a dressing room, but it is exactly the kind of thinking that allows small rule-bending to grow into something bigger. If players believe that rivals are doing the same, the line between a tactic and cheating becomes blurry, and that is how a scandal like Cape Town can happen.
That said, MacGill deserves some credit for speaking so openly, as most players from his era have stayed quiet. His honesty gives the sport a chance to talk about what really took place, rather than pretend the problem started in 2018 and ended with three bans.
The game’s authorities should treat these comments as a prompt for a broader conversation. Clearer rules, stricter monitoring of the ball and a culture that does not excuse shortcuts would do more good than harsh punishments after every new revelation. Honest talk about the past is the only way to protect the future.
To keep up to date with all the latest cricket news and share your opinion on the biggest topics, visit our Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter) pages.