Boland brushes off Khawaja's claim that Victoria ruled ball tampering

Speaking in Melbourne on Monday, Boland shrugged off Khawaja's claim that the Victorians of the 2000s and 2010s were the finest ball tamperers in the Sheffield Shield. He said he hadn't seen anything untoward and pointed the question back at the author.

Khawaja's book Sabr, out Tuesday, argues tampering was simply how you won at a dead, flat MCG. Reverse swing and a bit of spin were the only routes to a result, he writes, and Victoria's players were geniuses at roughing up one side, sometimes by throwing the ball into the wicket.

He admits he never scratched the ball himself but says he knew what was happening and wasn't against it, making him complicit. Khawaja also names Victoria's bowling coach Mick Lewis, who was filmed raking the ball across concrete in 2016, and describes an unnamed player in his first Shield season who kept super glue on his towel and scrubbed the rough side of the ball against it to make it reverse.

Boland, though, says the era is over. Since Cape Town, he argued, reverse swing has largely gone out of the game, and he suggested that what happens at lower levels without cameras is a different story.

Khawaja's version lines up with former Australian coach Darren Lehmann, who told ABC Sport's Summer Grandstand on Saturday that tampering had been a big part of cricket for 150 years before the Australians were caught in South Africa. Lehmann, now a co-host on the ABC's Cricket Podcast, said the practice is obsolete and that Australia paid a heavy price.

The tampering chapter was redacted until Saturday morning, and Khawaja has been on a two-week media run promoting the book. He has taken heat for sitting on the information for eight years, but posted on social media that he didn't throw anyone under the bus. Cricket Australia has repeatedly denied that all players and staff knew about Cape Town.