David Warner’s manager says Aussie star has been ‘completely villainised’ in Sandpapergate cover-up

David Warner’s manager says the Aussie star has kept quiet about who was really involved in Sandpapergate, and the full story will make his penalty look even more outrageous.

David Warner’s manager has made bombshell allegations Australian players were given the green light to ball tamper in Test cricket.

It came as an emotional Candice Warner opened up about how Cricket Australia’s drawn out process into her husband’s leadership ban review had put her family “through hell” and even exposed their young daughters to disgraceful abuse from cricket fans.

Warner’s manager James Erskine said in an explosive interview on SEN Radio that Cricket Australia had messed up the entire process around Warner’s punishment, starting with his lifetime ban being handed down without scope for an appeal, to now undertaking a review process that threatened to expose the full skeletons of what transpired more than four years ago.

Speaking about Warner’s decision to give up on attempts to overturn his lifetime leadership ban, Erskine sensationally claimed that the discussion about ball tampering in the Australian team was first raised back in 2016 in the Hobart changerooms with two officials present, 16 months before the team was busted on the field using sandpaper on the ball at Newlands in 2018.

While Erskine did not name the officials, or say where they were from, his comments are set to open another enormous can of worms for the sport.

Erskine said he had advised his client at the time to “shut up and say nothing” about the Sandpapergate incident, but after explaining Warner’s frustration and the “trauma” he and his family experienced in the wake of his leadership ban the manager said the full story would soon come out.

“The truth will come out,” Erskine said.

David Warner during the Cape Town Test in 2013. Picture: Getty Images

“You’d have to be a blind black labrador to (not) realise that there was far more than three people (Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft) involved in this thing.

“There’s lots of people … there’s two cricketers at the time that said, why don’t we just put our hands up and tell the truth, they can’t fire all of us.

“That’s what’s happened.

“They all got a caning and basically David Warner was completely villainized.

“He has shut up, he has protected Cricket Australia, he has 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.

“(Two officials) in the changing room in Hobart (in 2016) were basically berating the team for losing to South Africa.

“Warner said, ‘We’ve got to reverse swing the ball. And the only way we can reverse swing the ball is basically by tampering with it’ – so they were told to do it.

“I’m completely against it, I think tampering with balls is a joke, but it has gone on for centuries. Everybody has been fiddling around with balls and the penalty at the time by the ICC was a one-match ban.

“I’m not suggesting that’s right because I don’t think you should tamper with the ball.

“This was blown out of all proportion, partly because of the Prime Minister, but partly for the total reaction of the general public.

“I totally agree, it wasn’t something that was good, but it’s got to the stage where three people have been completely victimised above everybody else.

“And it’s not fair.”

An unnamed official who was in the room confirmed the fact the team was told something along the lines of “you’re paid to win not just to play”.

News Corp contacted multiple officials from that era, who all emphatically say there was no inference made to cheating.

“There just wasn’t,” one official said.

“No one would ever advocate cheating. There was nothing said anything like what you’re proposing.”

Steve Smith and David Warne were suspended for 12 months.

Warner pulled out of the independent review into rescinding his leadership ban after revealing the assembled panel had demanded he be subjected to a public cross examination.

“I am not prepared for my family to be the washing machine for cricket’s dirty laundry,” Warner said in a statement earlier this week.

“My family is more important to me than cricket.”

Erskine said CA were at fault for the saga, and Warner’s silence was protecting more than just his family.

“Funnily enough, had David turned around and put his family through more, he could have told everybody exactly what happened because they were asking the questions,” he told SEN.

“… when the truth comes out, people are going to turn around and say, well, why was David Warner picked on.

“I just think that Cricket Australia have made it so difficult – they’ve been sitting on the fence and they’ll have splinters in their arse.

“… There’s one thing I hate in life is injustice, and this is injustice at its greatest level.”

Candice Warner said on Triple M’s Summer Breakfast that her family had been forced to live with this pain since 2018, and enough was enough.

“It has been an incredibly intense, not just 12 months, but since March 2018, we live it day to day, that pain doesn’t go away,” Warner said.

“It is still raw, we go to the cricket so often to watch David play and there is always people yelling things out in the crowd, or at my daughters who proudly wear their dad’s T-shirt with their father’s name on the back.

“The fact my daughters have to cop abuse because of incidents that happened in the past is not fair.

“My husband David, he always puts family first, he’s fiercely protective of myself and our three girls.

“Cricket is not everything, cricket is what he does, but cricket does not define him and the person he is, the fact there was a lack of player welfare and no welfare about David and our family speaks volumes.”

Originally published as David Warner’s manager says Aussie star has been ‘completely villainised’ in Sandpapergate cover-up