Steve Smith has slammed the decision to prevent David Warner captaining Australia for the rest of the career.
Ahead of the second test against West Indies, the opening batsman withdrew his appeal against his lifetime captaincy ban by announcing it in a fiery statement. This is after Cricket Australia had rewritten their code of conduct to allow Warner to appeal the ban. But after outlining a process in which he didn’t agree with, Warner issued a message in which he announced he had pulled out of the process.
"From my point of view, banning for life from leadership is just fundamentally wrong," Smith said after Australia's 419-run victory. "David served his time like I did. For us, we know he's a leader around the group, and on and off the field he's doing a tremendous job."
He added: "It's been a difficult one for him, it's been a difficult week. It has been more of a distraction for Davey, no doubt, going through that himself. David has said he's done and dusted and get on with it. He's got our full support. Hopefully he can have a really big series for us against South Africa with the bat."
Warner wanted a private meeting in front of an independent panel in which he would argue against the ban. However, the commissions ruled that it should be held in public, which Warner argued would have become a "lynching" and he wasn't willing to put his family and team-mates through a retrial of the controversial events at Newlands in 2018.
"Counsel Assisting the Review Panel appeared to be determined to revisit the events of March 2018 and the Review Panel appears determined to expose me and my family to further humiliation and harm by conducting a media circus,” he wrote. "Regrettably, I have no practical alternative at this point in time but to withdraw my application.
“I am not prepared to subject my family or my teammates to further trauma and disruption by accepting a departure from the way in which my application should be dealt with pursuant to the Code of Conduct. Some things are more important than cricket. It appears that the Panel has given no more than passing consideration to issues of player welfare and the interests of Australian cricket and is instead determined to conduct a public lynching.
"Since that Test and even though my ban from leadership roles may never be lifted, I have taken it upon myself to reform, to rehabilitate and to transform my approach to the game," he wrote. "I have served and been subject to a crushing, unprecedented, penalty that has horribly impacted me and my family for the past nearly five years."
A Cricket Australia spokesperson confirmed that they supported Warner's bid to have the hearing in private. "We are disappointed with this outcome as our intention was to give David the opportunity to demonstrate why his lifetime leadership ban should be varied at an independent hearing and we amended our Code of Conduct accordingly," a statement said. "We supported David's wish for these discussions to be heard behind closed doors and respect his decision to withdraw his application.
“David is a very senior and highly regarded member of the Australian team who has been a great ambassador for the game as a whole since his return from a year-long ban."
