Forget the details. David Warner’s angry decision to drop the application over his lifetime leadership ban is yet another failure by Cricket Australia to make difficult decisions in a timely manner.
Once again, cricket has been trashed as a result.
On the eve of one of the season’s highlights, the day-night Test in Adelaide, Warner felt so disillusioned by a nine-month process that he took the nuclear option and made his frustration public on Wednesday.
This is a guy who will open the batting for his country in the coming days. Warner was so sick of the ongoing legal arguments that he decided enough was enough.
This is what happens when Cricket Australia outsources leadership. When it hands over the responsibility of its players and its processes to legal eagles more interested in a sub-clause than the good of the game.
It took an angry Cricket Australia board a matter of days in 2018 to hand Warner and Steve Smith 12-month bans and Cameron Bancroft a nine-month ban and then ban Smith from a leadership position for two years and Warner for life.
David Warner fired an angry broadside at Cricket Australia.Credit:Getty
There was no need to hand down leadership bans. The CA board approves captaincy appointments. They simply needed to remove Smith as captain and Warner as his deputy and pick other candidates.
Instead, the legal mess that has followed brought us to this point. If the board could hand out bans like speeding tickets, then they should have been able to withdraw them in appreciation of Warner’s faultless behaviour over almost five years.
On the one hand, Cricket Australia have put their collective arm around Warner and pulled together an unprecedented deal to have him play in the Big Bash despite a hectic international schedule. And in return Cricket Australia left Warner to the vagaries of a process they lost control of.
Losing control has been an unfortunate trait of Cricket Australia.
They lost control earlier this year by failing to make a strong and timely decision over Justin Langer’s tenure as coach, creating a vacuum that Langer’s mates, some of the game’s former greats, noisily filled. The women’s Ashes was completely swamped by the saga.
It took Test captain Pat Cummins to show the leadership Cricket Australia failed to with a strong and dignified press conference that drew a line under the sorry tale.
Tim Paine was forced to resign as Test captain a little more than a year ago after Cricket Australia could not bring themselves to sack him. Paine went following a sexting scandal. The exchange with a cricket employee took place four years earlier and Paine was subsequently cleared by two cricket inquiries.
If Cricket Australia disliked what he did they should have sacked him at the time.
Steve Smith and the Big Bash pales by comparison, but it is another exhibit of Australian cricket’s failures.
Smith wanted to play as a replacement player for the Sydney Sixers when a one-day series against New Zealand was cancelled last January, for the minimum $2000 a game.
Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley outsourced the decision to the states, who roundly rejected the Cricket NSW proposal.
This came at a time when the Big Bash was fading, prompting Channel Seven to take court action again over an alleged lack of quality.
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