Someone once told me a fantastic – but completely unverified – story about David Warner. The thrust of it goes that around the time Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft were banished by Cricket Australia over the Cape Town ball-tampering affair, Warner took up golf. In the most magnificent way.
So serious was his devotion that Warner dropped not much less than Australia’s average full-time salary in the singular pursuit of joining one of Sydney’s more prestigious clubs.
David Warner has a desire to captain his country again. Should he be allowed the chance?Credit:Getty
Not long after his admission to that inner sanctum of membership, Warner rocks up for his tee time for his first round at his new club. Perched high behind the steering wheel of his iridescent white Lamborghini Huracan.
(At this juncture, one must carefully examine the believability of the tale. For if any of you dear readers have ever owned a Lamborghini, or even just seen one flung around by Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear, you’ll know there’s no way anyone’s getting a box of Romeo y Julieta cigars in the “boot” of one of those things, let alone a bag of golf clubs).
Anyway, Warner completes his round without much fanfare. Dusk then befalls the day; Warner grabs his keys, and departs just as he’d arrived. Except for his act of laminating the tarmac of the club’s carpark with a generous portion of his rear-wheel Pirellis. If you get my drift.
Now whether this is entirely factual or not quite, one can examine the scenario through more than one prism. Yes, it’s devilishly inappropriate that such carry-on might play out in the carpark of a golf club, be it Royal Hurstville or Royal Sydney (and it wasn’t Royal Sydney).
The Lamborghini Huracan.Credit:Keystone
But, equally, it’s hilarious to think someone might have the temerity to release into the world such unbridled nonchalance on the sounding of the home-time bell on their first day of kindergarten. I reckon Warner’s my kind of guy.
The purpose of raising all of this is to frame the descent to a less jocular consideration: of whether Warner ought to be appointed Australia’s cricket captain in the 50-over format of the sport. In circumstances where when he was sent to CA’s own Phantom Zone, Warner’s card was indelibly marked: never, never EVER to be captain, of anything, ever again.
Should that lifetime ban, imposed as a consequence of a single and specific indiscretion, be allowed to stand untouched? Forever? Put another way, should it be that simple and straightforward that Warner doesn’t now deserve a second chance?
The answer, simply, is that there should no longer be any lingering impediment to Warner leading his country, in some capacity.
He has already served a hastily imposed, unquestionably grievous 12-month ban from international cricket, for breaching CA’s code of conduct. In another sense, though, Warner has been in purgatory ever since, even though he has been allowed to play his sport again.
Those penalties concern being found guilty of conduct contrary to the spirit of cricket; unbecoming; harmful to the interests of cricket; and likely to bring the cricket into disrepute.
Severe sanctions, against which Warner refused to appeal even though they were highly likely to have been reduced by a fair-minded, independent arbiter. For the same misconduct, the International Cricket Council left Warner entirely untouched.
Many athletes of the stature and standing of Warner have done much worse on a sporting field; a cricket field even, and suffered no sanction. It’s almost as if the “moral police” infected the disciplinary process on the “Sandpaper Three” – why otherwise would a “lifetime” ban be imposed on Warner?
Warner’s own conduct, summarised, involved (a) planning an attempt to artificially alter the condition of the ball during the Third Test in Cape Town in March 2018; (b) demonstrating to a teammate (Bancroft) how to do it; (c) commissioning him to carry out the plan; and (d) running interference with match officials when the ham-fisted “sandpaper” subterfuge was uncloaked.
Is that cocktail of woe worth 12 months on the sideline and a further lifetime barrier to proper redemption?
I don’t reckon so; indeed I don’t believe it is worth 12 weeks. Measured in NRL cryptocurrency, the same conduct might attract nothing more severe than one end-of-season BBQ ban with the loss of premium fridge privileges, to be served in 2027. Because it’s all about the fans now, isn’t it?
Aside from anything else, sandpapering the ball in Cape Town FAILED. The umpires didn’t even replace the ball after Bancroft was caught shoving a sliver of 120-grit inside his King Kong B(undies).
Does the stench of unanswered questions still linger? Sure; I can think of many. How the bloody hell did those bowling not have at least some suspicion that the ball was being massacred? Perhaps the answer is that the sandpaper wasn’t effective? Again, the umpires didn’t substitute the ball.
Was it truly an isolated event, or just the first time players had been caught? The limited scope of CA’s internal investigations suggest the governing body never wanted to find out.
Did the captain, Smith, turn the proverbial blind eye? Indeed, was this seriously the first time sandpaper had been used, or the first time the concocted strategy had been publicly unmasked?
How do you square up Smith’s instinctive blurting out in a media conference that the “leadership group” had knowledge of the sandpaper strategy, if the converse is true and nobody but Warner, Smith and Bancroft had even the smallest inkling as to what was going on?
But the time for the truth isn’t now, as some sort of final act of bloodletting. The time for the actual truth (not the carefully constructed narrative) to emerge was years ago, when Warner and Smith were whacked horribly hard. An appeal is where the unvarnished truth would’ve come to the surface.
Steve Smith bats.Credit:AP
That wouldn’t have been pleasant; perhaps Cricket Australia owes a debt of gratitude to Warner in that regard.
Warner and his co-conspirators were way too harshly sanctioned in the first place, in circumstances where I suspect they each believed that the act of appealing to an unbiased and dispassionate CA commissioner would have resulted in them winning the battle but not the war, through being branded “NEVER TO TOUR AGAIN”.
He always deserved his day in court. Nobody died; nobody got hurt and there wasn’t even any blood despite sandpaper in someone’s undies.
Athletes in other sports do worse things. Someone of the ilk of Stephen Dank deserves his lifetime ban from all sports, which he is serving due to the carnage he inflicted on so many lives. But does James Hird deserve to be forbidden from coaching at Essendon again, a decade later? Tough question, with no straightforward answer.
All that can be said on Warner is he’s deserving of a second chance. What he doesn’t deserve, in all the circumstances, is to be reminded of this imbroglio for years to come. It’s time for him to come in from the cold, and given the opportunity to atone finally and properly.
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