Australian cricket legend Ian Healy revealed he was in the “dressing room that day” after David Warner’s manager James Erskine made explosive new ball tampering claims.
Warner released a statement on Instagram on Wednesday, revealing he withdrew his attempts to overturn his leadership ban, accusing the review panel of trying to create a “public lynching”.
Erskine later revealed he believes more players were involved in the 2018 ball tampering saga in South Africa before referencing an incident after the 2016 Hobart Test against South Africa.
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“Two senior executives were in the changing room in Hobart (in 2016) and basically were berating the team for losing against South Africa,” Erskine said on SEN1170.
“Warner said that we’ve got to reverse swing the ball and the only way we can reverse swing the ball is basically by tampering with it – and so they were told to do it.”
Healy, explained he entered the change rooms on that very day with another Test legend, Mark Taylor.
“I went into the dressing room that day,” Healy said on SENQ’s Pat and Heals.
“Mark Taylor and I went from our commentary box in Hobart to the dressing room to support the boys because they’d had a real failure against South Africa and that’s where five players were chopped.
“We went in that day and it would’ve happened that day where they were spoken to by unnamed people and said ‘we don’t pay you to do anything but win’ and that was the attitude that came out, which wasn’t good.”
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Erskine suggested that Cricket Australia officials also played a part in ball tampering schemes, stating: “you’d have to be a blind black Labrador” to believe only Smith, Warner and Bancroft were the guilty parties.
Healy responded by saying “I’m a blind black labrador because I don’t know of anyone else (who knew).
“I don’t know of any other incidents that James has come out and said so David has kept that well in-house, but now James has opened David’s mouth.
“That’s the bombshell that Cricket Australia didn’t want and this independent panel should have been behind closed doors sorting out.”
“The implications are there is high level involvement in this, they have only scraped the surface of the story,” Pat Welsh added.
