Three Australian players took full responsibility and had their careers derailed, he wrote. He added that Beardman was 14 when the events took place and would likely be content if the older figures faded from view.
In a column, Barney Ronay wrote that the scandal was back and had hit Australia hard because it was seen as sneaky. He said it was hard to overstate how large the story remained there.
Cummins then put distance between himself and the episode, pointing out that he was 24 and playing his 13th Test at the time, the column said.
Ronay noted that the remarks repeated the line taken by Australia's bowlers in a statement in 2021.
Ronay argued that Sandpapergate functioned as Australia's Bazball: a strange, inward-facing cricketing contortion rather than a dispute the rest of the world followed. He wrote that nobody else actually cared, and that the scandal would make little sense to anyone not already devoted to Test cricket.
He cast the row as a public airing of a tense internal dynamic in Australian cricket, which he described as shaped by a terse but fraternal conservatism, and as a test of toughness, discipline and how the country wants to see itself.
The argument, he wrote, would not be settled by logic or compromise, because it was about change, identity, and what still mattered.
English readers, he added, should not mistake the heat for a shared obsession. The piece said English people liked Australians, but treated the sandpaper affair as Australia's own psychodrama, just as Bazball had been England's.