With the ghosts of Australia's sandpapergate affair continuing to rock world cricket, England veteran Joe Root denies his team were involved in the dark art of ball tampering.
Usman Khawaja unleashed a bombshell last week when he claimed the entire Australia Test XI knew about the plot to tamper with the ball in Cape Town back in 2018.
Khawaja, who was the team's opener at the time, even suggested Australia had figured out a way to alter the ball to make it reverse swing during the home 2017/18 series.
"If we raised the flaps up on the quarter seam on that ball, it was almost like it had a rudder on it and it'd start reverse swinging," Khawaja wrote in his book Sabr.
Khawaja went on to write that "the whole world was doing whatever little they could to try and reverse swing the ball".
Root, in Perth ahead of the three-match ODI series against Australia, was asked whether any England teams he had been involved in had tampered with the ball.
"I can only speak from my own experiences and that’s not how I feel, no," Root said.
The 35-year-old was England's captain during that 2017-18 Test series, which Australia won 4-0.
Root played a straight bat when asked whether he thought Australia had tampered with the ball during that series.
"I wasn't in that (Australian) dressing room. I don't know what went on. I don't want to speculate," he added.
"My focus is with this team right now and what we've got coming up.
"In terms of everything that's happened, and come out in the last little while, we obviously have no idea. It's all speculation.
"Our focus, our concerns are on this three-match series."
Australia paceman Xavier Bartlett said the team were just focusing on the upcoming ODI series rather than the ball-tampering scandal.
"Not really, to be honest. It hasn't been spoken about," Bartlett replied when asked if it had been a distraction.
"A lot of this group wasn't there at the time eight years ago. It's a long time, and ... we're just trying to work on this series, which is a big series for us coming up leading into an ODI World Cup."
The one-day series begins in Perth on Friday.
