David Warner has been assured there will be no barrier to coaching and leadership roles once he retires from playing, as Cricket Australia’s chief executive Nick Hockley came under sustained attack for the way his lifetime ban from captaincy had been handled.
Sources close to Warner told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that part of why he had entered the process to have his leadership ban overturned was to ensure it would not be held against him in any post-playing jobs he may seek, including coaching positions.
David Warner was worried he would be banned from coaching after he retires.Credit:Chris Hopkins
“Cricket Australia confirms that David is not banned from coaching,” a Cricket Australia spokesperson said when asked to clarify.
One former senior Cricket Australia figure contacted on Thursday suggested that it was “so bad for the game” to see the matter still being talked about five years on and that Warner’s ban should have had a sunset clause included in 2018.
A member of the 2018 board agreed that, given the board had imposed the leadership element of the ban, the directors should have retained the right to rescind it rather than handing that responsibility over to the integrity unit.
Current players spoken to by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on the first morning of the Test against the West Indies made it clear that they were united in supporting Warner and sharing a sense of incomprehension about the process. “We all support Davey and like him,” one said. “Wish this was done 12 months ago and was done in the right spirit.”
Warner’s explosive statement withdrawing from the process landed on the eve of the Adelaide Test, where he was dismissed for 21 during the opening session on Thursday.
Steve Smith, who was banned from leadership roles for two years for his part in the Cape Town ball-tampering scandal, is standing in as captain for the injured Pat Cummins, a sign of Smith’s rehabilitation since his tearful return from South Africa in 2018.
Cricket Australia’s directors convened in Adelaide for a regular board meeting, at which the fallout from Warner’s lifetime leadership ban process and Hockley’s role was inevitably discussed.
Before the board meeting, at the unveiling of a memorial for the late Rod Marsh, Hockley was seen in animated discussion with Greg Dyer, the chair of the Australian Cricketers Association, while board directors made a quick exit for their meeting at the end of formalities.
The cricketers’ association, which made the first entreaty to Cricket Australia to take a fresh look at Warner’s leadership ban a year ago and aided him in his application, has so far declined to comment on the affair.
Accountability for the way the Warner application has played out rests almost entirely with Hockley and Cricket Australia’s head of integrity Jacqui Partridge – albeit with sign-off by the board’s chair Lachlan Henderson and the other directors.
Hockley and cricketers’ association chief executive Todd Greenberg spoke with Warner in Pakistan earlier this year about how he saw his future role in Australian cricket, including leadership prospects and the possibility of him returning to the Big Bash League.
In a recent management reshuffle, Partridge’s integrity unit was shifted to being directly reportable to Hockley, having previously been a wing of the governing body’s legal department.
After that change, Partridge and Hockley worked together with Kings Counsels on the question of how the code of conduct would be rewritten to allow for long-term penalties to be reviewed and commuted.
David Warner of Randwick-Petersham and Steve Smith of Sutherland embrace at the end of a Sydney grade cricket match during their 2018 playing bans.Credit:Getty
That rewrite gave code of conduct commissioners the right to choose how the hearing would be staged, including whether it was held in private or in public.
Once that review was completed and the code rewritten, Partridge chose the three commissioners who would read Warner’s application and discuss the long-term penalty at his hearing, and she also appointed the legal counsel who would assist them.
Cricket Australia has declined to name who the three commissioners were, but they were drawn from a group of five: Alan Sullivan, Robert Heath, Adrian Anderson, Jane Seawright and Leon Zwier. Anderson, a former AFL executive, led the review that brought about the formation of the integrity unit.
In an extraordinary statement shared on Wednesday night, Warner explained how the insistence of the commissioners and counsel assisting them that the hearing be public, followed by a lack of reassurance that this would not be the case after the counsel assisting had been replaced, forced him to withdraw from the process.
Cricket Australia explained that concerns about a public hearing would most likely have been removed when Warner’s legal team made submissions asking for privacy, as any such submission would have been supported by Cricket Australia’s representatives.
Warner’s manager, James Erskine, said Warner had done the right thing by keeping his mouth shut and not discussing any wider implications from the 2018 scandal, even though it was self-evident “there was far more than three people involved in this thing”.
“He has shut up, he protected Cricket Australia, he protected his fellow players on my advice, because at the end of the day no one wanted to hear any more of it and he’s got on playing cricket,” Erskine told SEN Radio on Thursday.
“Why Cricket Australia couldn’t have done a very sensible thing and said listen, it’s not legal that someone doesn’t have a right of appeal.
“It’s just absurd, why should he have to go through that, he has done everything he possibly could for Cricket Australia and for his team, and now he’s being treated like this … this is injustice at its greatest level.”
Warner’s NSW teammate Steve O’Keefe said the original bans were “based on public opinion at the time”.
“When we all look back on it, we understand the guys did the wrong thing and it didn’t look good but I think the punishment was way too harsh and Dave is right to not want to put his family through that again,” O’Keefe said.
“To put him back through all that would be devastating and pointless. It seems like a bit of a toothless way of trying to attack that point of Dave doing the wrong thing but making him relive it, then making a decision based on it again. We all know what happened. We’ve all moved on from it. Just change your decisions. Let him captain Australia.”
O’Keefe also objected to a public hearing. “It’s dredging up old turf that the team doesn’t need and the public doesn’t want to hear. We want to be celebrating this team at the moment, not going after these witch hunts.”
