Over a long career, David Warner has presented many versions of himself. The short-form bludgeoner of his T20 debut in 2009 gave way to the studious opener of his first Test century on a Hobart greentop in 2011. The raucous presence known as The Bull who was suspended from the 2013 Ashes gave way to the contemplative Reverend by 2015, schooling teammates on the power of positive thinking, before returning to his most confrontational mode before the Ashes in 2017. The instigator of the sandpaper ball-tampering plot in 2018 served a year’s playing ban, ran the well-worn path of public redemption via on-field success, and has since presented himself as an elder statesman with an accordingly impeccable disciplinary record.
The way he is perceived has also shifted, in cricket media at least, but no shifts have been bigger than the past few weeks as his campaign to have his leadership ban overturned ran into a brick wall. Where his co-accused Steve Smith was banned from captaincy for two years, and Cameron Bancroft not at all, Warner was for life. And while he was in the gun in 2018, here is now broadly a consensus that his punishment was excessive and the review process unfair.
On that final point, Cricket Australia had to regulate on the run given a lack of precedent. In 2018, Warner was offered his penalty with the option to accept it or dispute the charge at a hearing. By accepting, the matter was finalised. But CA’s structure did not anticipate dealing with career-long sanctions, because there were no likely offences to attract them without being escalated elsewhere.
Corruption falls to the International Cricket Council, violence to criminal court. CA was there for lesser offences, meaning shorter terms of punishment that accordingly would never need revisiting. To change Warner’s penalty after nearly five years, CA needed a new process. Assembling an independent panel to hear the case made sense, given that a board decision overturning a board penalty would be rightly seen as ethically compromised.
The panel could not have been more impressive: Alan Sullivan, Leon Zwier, Jane Seawright, Robert Heath and Adrian Anderson are all top-level lawyers, while Sullivan is a part of the Australian Rugby League Commission, Seawright is a director at Netball Australia, and Anderson was a top Australian Football League executive for almost a decade.
What neither Warner nor CA anticipated was that the panel would want to revisit the original offence, taking new evidence and doing so publicly. He has grounds for complaint: by accepting the sanction Warner had already admitted guilt. There was no need to establish it again in a review supposed to be based on his conduct since that time. He withdrew his appeal with CA’s support, saying that such a hearing would only stir up trouble for his family and his teammates.
The elephant in the room is that such a hearing would only cause problems because truth was never established in the first place. CA took two days to conduct a self-serving investigation concluding that no Australia player had breached the rules before the day they were caught on camera, despite suspicion having been aroused otherwise. Warner signed off on this version of events and has been a beneficiary ever since, given there was no further investigation into him.
At the same time, his private dissatisfaction has become common knowledge. The view from the Warner camp has always been that he was CA’s fall guy: encouraged to stoke conflict on the field, given disciplinary warnings for doing so, given a harsher punishment than Smith and Bancroft because of those warnings, while being blamed for tampering that was done on behalf of the team. Teammates have openly disputed the latter claim. Before last week’s Adelaide Test, Warner’s manager added a claim that CA executives approved tampering as early as November 2016.
Puzzlingly, what that comment invites is speculation Australia’s ball-tampering began in 2016. So Warner wants a review of his penalty on the basis that he admitted guilt, even as his manager’s comments attempt to downplay and mitigate that guilt, while simultaneously underlining the possibility that broader wrongdoing happened at earlier times. In taking umbrage at the prospect of further investigation, Warner has only illustrated why established practitioners of the law would deem it necessary.
Even taking things at face value, the central argument is whether Warner has been hard done by. It is apparently necessary to repeat that he was never banned for ball-tampering in Cape Town, but for bringing the game into disrepute. This was more to do with the cover-up, having Smith and Bancroft lie to a press conference about Warner’s involvement while he denied it to investigators. It was also to do with what happened after being accused of tampering in the previous Test at Port Elizabeth, when scrutiny made him turn to the newest member of the team.
Bancroft had been a Test player for less than four months. In the first innings at Cape Town he had just played his best hand for Australia, top-scoring with a hard-fought 77. Then Warner asked him to take sandpaper on to the field. It’s no surprise he obeyed.
Whether Bancroft would have been a long-term success we will never know, but we do know his career has never recovered. Warner and Smith have enjoyed uninterrupted and fruitful years since. Warner was the vice-captain and putting a junior player in that position was abjectly the opposite of leadership. It is entirely deserving of being counted out as captain for good.
Warner would not have anticipated leading Australia again. The whole process was more about symbolically removing a black mark next to his name. The impulse is understandable. But perhaps becoming a better person is about making up for black marks, not erasing them altogether. Warner did what he did. He came back from it, won an Allan Border medal, a T20 World Cup, another Ashes series, and is still a selection lock in all three formats.
He has made millions more dollars from Australian cricket and is about to play his 100th Test match, with a record that sits comfortably in the pantheon, and can leave on his own terms to a thousand opportunities of what to do next. On the scale of hard done by, there’s barely a flicker.
