Cricket Australia’s senior code-of-conduct commissioner Alan Sullivan KC has defended the independent panel’s decision to hold a public hearing into the review of David Warner’s lifetime leadership ban, saying an open process would have avoided “a whole lot of speculation”.
Speaking on Wednesday – the day originally set down for the hearing before Warner withdrew his application to have the ban overturned – Sullivan also said any attempt by Cricket Australia to interfere with the independent review would do serious harm to the governing body’s integrity.
David Warner signs autographs for fans in Adelaide.Credit:AP
“We are an independent panel,” Sullivan told the Herald and The Age.
Sullivan – who served on the NRL judiciary between 1993 and 1997, has been a member of the Court of Arbitration for Sport since 2000, was a former deputy chairman of the FIFA ethics committee, was an FFA appeals committee member for 10 years and is an International Cricket Council code-of-conduct commissioner – said public hearings avoided “ill-informed or uninformed conjecture”, adding that AFL and NRL tribunals were open to the media.
“They’re heard in public because if they’re heard in private there’d be a whole lot of speculation about what happened behind the closed doors and people will make guesstimate,” Sullivan said.
“Or one party will leak selected versions of things. So we just wanted it all to be open, to the extent possible with David’s well-being in mind.
“We would undoubtedly have probably been very sympathetic to requests that certain things be heard in private if he wanted it to be heard. But generally speaking, we didn’t want any room for ill-informed or uninformed conjecture.”
Warner was furious that questions might have been asked about the 2018 Cape Town ball-tampering scandal and that the media might have been allowed to cover all or part of the hearing when his application was only about the length of the ban. He has always maintained his guilt for his part in the incident.
He withdrew the application on the eve of the Adelaide Test, accusing the three-man code-of-conduct commission panel of attempting to hold a “public lynching” and said he did not want to put his family or his teammates through any more “trauma”.
Sullivan said the review had no intention of rehashing the 2018 investigation but that some relevant questions might have come up.
“To get a feel for it, you’ve got to actually be able to ask questions about the submission,” he said. “So we couldn’t agree that there’d be no hearing in respect of the submissions. You can’t ask questions of a piece of paper.”
Under Cricket Australia’s code of conduct there was no further right of appeal once Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft accepted their charges and penalties in 2018 as the country swirled with public outrage. Warner and Smith were banned for a year while Bancroft was banned for nine months. Smith was also given a two-year leadership ban and Warner’s was imposed for life.
For the second year in a row, Smith, vice-captain of the Test side, led Australia in the Adelaide Test after skipper Pat Cummins was unable to take his place in the side.
CA code-of-conduct hearings and any subsequent appeals and reviews have in the past been heard confidentially. Appeals and reviews, which are rare, can now be heard in public after sections of the code were recently rewritten to allow more scope for reviews, including the one into Warner’s ban.
Cameron Bancroft batting for Western Australia on December 4.Credit:Getty Images
CA had opposed holding a public hearing around Warner’s ban and Sullivan agreed that “theoretically” CA could amend the code of conduct to make hearings private, ignore what the review commissioners had found, and then make its own ruling.
“But if they did that the whole code-of-conduct commission would be in tatters,” Sullivan said. “They wouldn’t get any further commissioners to sit on cases for them because we’re not going to sit and spend lots of free time and effort to try to make a decision and then it can just be unilaterally altered by someone else.”
Sullivan refused to speculate on what the possible outcome of the hearing would have been but senior sources close to CA believe there was a strong chance Warner’s life ban would have been commuted, given he has served almost five years.
Adam Lunn, acting for Warner, doubts he will make another application to have his leadership ban commuted and criticised CA CEO Nick Hockley for failing to act.
“Cricket Australia imposed this sanction back in 2018 and effectively, they clumsily dragged us into this mess way back then,” Lunn said. “Now only cricket Australia can fix it.”
“Nick Hockley says it’s out of Cricket Australia’s hands, but that’s nonsense. If it’s out of Cricket Australia’s hands, whose hands is it in? Hockley should show the leadership to do something about it and fix it.”
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