Pat Cummins: Australian captain plays his shots in remarkable one-hour sandpaper saga press conference

Pat Cummins said he would stand and face up to all and as many questions as the waiting press pack had to ask.

And he did.

Bouncer, bouncer, yorker, yorker, inswingers and outswingers. Cummins saw it all in an hour-long press conference with no-holds-barred from either side.

But he wasn’t just dead-batting, or fending off questions like teammates have in recent days — and for the past eight years.

He played plenty of shots along the way one of the most extraordinary sporting press conferences we have ever seen.

Usman Khawaja’s recollection of the events of the sandpaper cheating scandal — released in his bombshell book this week — were “nonsense”, “100 per cent wrong” and “casual with people’s lives”.

The Australian team had a “dark underbelly” under Darren Lehmann at the time.

The bans handed down to Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith and David Warner were “heavy-handed”.

Cummins had seen a bottle-cap being used in a Sheffield Shield match to alter the state of the ball, but had also heard of sandpaper being taped to the inside of fingers, super glue being applied to wicketkeeping gloves and mints rubbed on the ball.

This was a masterclass in crisis management. The slew of questions came thick, fast and were many and varied. These press conferences can be difficult because reporters have different lines of questioning, particularly when sport and news reporters both jump in.

Not every gap in the Australian public’s knowledge of those events was filled and the stark differences between Cummins and Khawaja’s stories have widened some of those.

But Cummins was specific, expansive, thoughtful and seemingly honest.

He wasn’t afraid of burning bridges with Khawaja, and thereby Warner, along the way, despite stressing they are friends.

And his responses weren’t limited to sandpaper specifically. Cummins answered, at length, about the fine art of reverse-swing to give context around what Australian bowlers would and would not have seen, or been looking for, in Cape Town.

He also fielded questions about Khawaja’s other claims, including the one Cummins felt was “more serious”, that Khawaja’s background played a part in him not being picked as interim captain when Smith was banned.

Cummins said he wanted to speak about the saga for as long as required today, but then never again.

There’s no doubt he will be asked about it again, because Australian cricket fans are missing pieces of the puzzle. But this was as comprehensive a response as he possibly could’ve given.