Cricket Australia is once again hit with the infamous sandpapergate controversy (Credit: Cricket Australia) Former Australian spinner Stuart MacGill, who participated in 44 Test matches and three ODIs from 1998 to 2008 for his nation, acknowledged using sandpaper to tamper with the ball during his playing career. He claimed that at the time, no one considered it a cheating scheme. During a conversation on Usman Khawaja's shocking revelation in his new autobiography on a FanaticsTV YouTube show, MacGill acknowledged it alongside fellow countrymen Steve O'Keefe and Moises Henriques. Khawaja asserted that everyone on the team—not only Cameron Bancroft, David Warner, and Steve Smith—was aware of the 2018 ball-tampering incident against South Africa, a claim that Warner has since supported. MacGill interrupted O'Keefe and Henriques while they were talking about the several ball-tampering techniques, they had observed over the years on the YouTube show. “I’d cut a small piece of sandpaper and tape it to my thumb. It was not a part of a massive ‘global cheating scam’; I was just really curious to see what would happen and if it would work. And oh, it works (laughs). 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 on the field, pick it up and go on the field. I would tape a little bit of a square of sandpaper on my thumb, pick the ball up just after tea, scratch the living daylights out of it, pull the sandpaper off, chuck 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," he said. Notably, this tactic was very similar to what Khawaja refers to as the Australians' initial plan for the 2018 trip, which the coaches supported. Even now, the cricket players who have refuted claims of ball tampering—including Mitchell Starc on Tuesday—have only disputed knowing that sandpaper was there on the field at the time Bancroft was caught, not that there had been any ball tampering. During his career, ball tampering was common, according to MacGill, who also mentioned how one of his teams used to freeze the match ball to test how it would affect the game and how he once sewed a piece of sandpaper on his pants. "It probably has been (ball tampering going on since the early days of Test cricket) because it’s just getting a competitive advantage, right? And 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; I don’t feel bad about it," he said. Nikhil is an accomplished sports journalist with extensive experience spanning several years across digital, and multimedia platforms. Currently contr... View More