“The amendment would allow a person to request a penalty that they had accepted be reviewed after an appropriate period of time.” — Cricket Australia prepare for Warner’s return to leadership.
Telford Vice / Geelong, Victoria
NON-AUSTRALIAN cricket followers won’t be pleased to hear this, but they wouldn’t be surprised: David Warner, who was banned from leadership positions for the rest of his career for masterminding the ball-tampering disgrace that erupted in South Africa in 2018, could soon be granted the suits’ blessing to captain a team.
Cricket Australia’s board decided on Friday to change the organisation’s code of conduct to allow ongoing disciplinary sentences to be reviewed on appeal by an independent commissioner and, if deemed worthy, commuted.
“The amendment would allow a person to request a penalty that they had accepted be reviewed after an appropriate period of time,” a CA statement said. “Currently the code states that once a charge and penalty is accepted, there is no avenue for review. The onus would be on the applicant to prove they had undergone genuine reform relevant to the offence they were sanctioned for.
“Any review would not revisit the original sanction, other than suspension of a penalty in recognition of genuine reform. The board has requested that the CA head of integrity propose an amendment to the code for consideration. It was agreed that should an amendment in respect to long-term sanctions be adopted, any review of a penalty would be heard by an independent code of conduct commission.”
Warner is the only Australia player serving a life ban. He is less than five years into that sentence, but he could be back in charge of a side before Christmas: Cricket New South Wales asked CA to reconsider Warner’s case because the Sydney Thunder are in the market for a stand-in captain for the BBL that starts on December 13.
Aaron Finch, who retired from ODIs last month and turns 36 next month, has led Australia in 128 white-ball games and is clearly reaching the end of his career. He and Test captain Pat Cummins have voiced their support for Warner’s return to formal leadership — he was appointed as Smith’s Test and ODI vice-captain in August 2015 and was at the helm in a dozen ODIs and T20Is from 2016 and 2018 — and nevermind that Warner is three weeks older than Finch.
CA will thus have to live with non-Australians thinking the decision to revisit Warner’s starring role in Sandpapergate reeks of expediency. Now that Australian cricket needs him in a managerial capacity, he’s OK. From polecat to prodigal son. No further questions, your honour.
That’s a sweeping u-turn from 2018, when CA decided after an investigation that Warner had misled poor, innocent Cameron Bancroft into using sandpaper to roughen the ball and that Warner had dominated poor, gormless Smith into allowing that to happen. The plot was discovered by broadcasters SuperSport — otherwise known as South Africa’s 12th-man — during the Newlands Test in March 2018.
How long the Australians had deployed their dark art by then is not known. All three players lied about their cheating under mounting pressure, some of which came from the highest office in the land. Malcolm Turnbull, then Australia’s prime minister, said he was “shocked and bitterly disappointed” and demanded Smith’s removal as captain. Sandpapergate duly cost Smith and Warner their positions, and Darren Lehmann his job as coach. James Sutherland would have wanted a better farewell to his 17 years as CA’s chief executive than this mess. CA chair David Peever and board member Mark Taylor resigned.
Smith and Warner were banned from playing for a year and Bancroft for nine months. Smith was precluded from captaining for an additional year after he had served his suspension. Warner wasn’t afforded any such favour. South Africans looking on at the time were caught between schadenfreude at their bitter rivals being torn apart from within and bemusement that Australians could take the matter so seriously.
Faf du Plessis and Vernon Philander had been caught in the same ball-tampering act three times in the previous five years, and not once did Cricket South Africa take action against them. They left that to the ICC, who banned Smith for the last match of the 2018 series, merely fined Bancroft, and didn’t even charge Warner. Besides, it wasn’t as if Aussies had a reputation for fair play: Warner himself had behaved abominably on the field and off in the first Test of the 2018 series at Kingsmead, where he had to be restrained from physically confronting Quinton de Kock in a stairwell after submitting the South African to a sustained verbal attack while he was batting.
Might the vocal stance Warner took in the players’ protracted salary dispute with CA in 2017 have been a factor in the special treatment meted out to him by his home board seven months after agreement on salaries had been reached? Might the fact that he will play in the BBL for the first time since 2013, and the star quality he will lend the tournament, have helped manufacture his seeming redemption? Either way, there will be cynical smiles at the impending completion of Warner’s rehabilitation. Where, the smilers will ask, was the support for him in 2018 from Cummins — who was also part of the Newlands Test XI — and Finch, who by then had led Australia 11 times.
Gideon Haigh, Australia’s bard of bat and ball, addressed the issue in this weekend’s edition of The Australian: “It is anomalous and disproportionate in a world that pardons and winks at so much to impose a lifetime sentence for anything. It is holding cricketers to higher standards than public officials; it is mindless obstinacy to insist on the continuation of anything because it has been decided once. Justice needs to be tempered by mercy.”
There was little mercy for Warner to be seen, heard nor read in 2018. There was mostly loathing, in the press and seemingly everywhere else including the prime minister’s office, and shattered silence from within the dressing room. As for the problem of sticking to decisions made just the once, good luck telling an umpire — after you choose to bat and your team are bowled out for 47 — that the toss should be taken again and the game restarted.
Not that South Africans have a square centimetre of moral high ground to claim. They squandered it all in the way some of them reacted to Warner’s altercation with De Kock in Durban. To stoop to taking to the stands at St George’s Park wearing masks made from photographs of the face of Warner’s wife was the lowest point of shame and cowardice reached in this saga. Worse, most of their compatriots didn’t deplore their behaviour.
Of course, that didn’t stop dark chuckling in November last year when Tim Paine, who had emerged as a seeming beacon of decency, a rare and shining unugly Aussie, after taking over the captaincy from Smith from the last Test at the Wanderers in 2018, was undone by a sex scandal.
But that would be dangerously short-sighted. Because, even in a world as strewn with stats as cricket, sleaze and scandal don’t keep a scorecard for long. Just ask David Warner.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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