Candice, it’s not your fault
CANDICE Warner thinks she’s somehow to blame for the ball tampering scandal that’s engulfed her husband. But David Warner, with both his flaws and fierce talent, is a man of his own making, writes Claire Harvey.
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CANDICE Warner thinks this is all her fault.
“It’s killing me,” she told my colleague Buzz Rothfield yesterday.
She’s saying David Warner was pushed into making the most stupid decision of his life — to participate in cheating — because he was enraged by South African fans and players making lewd public remarks about Candice’s sexual past.
But I don’t think Candice should be blaming herself.
David Warner has spent the past decade on a path to the moment that has nearly destroyed his career. He is a complex man, a cocky little charmer with an outrageous talent and a temper to match.
His ferocity is what has propelled him from a Matraville houso kid to a sporting superstar. And most Australians don’t like him. They consider him a brat, a yobbo.
But I’ve always thought one of the most impressive things about Warner was that he married a woman with a past. A great many Australian sportsmen seem to hold true to the Madonna-whore perception of women of a century past: that women are either goodtime party girls, or they are wives.
Yes, as a younger woman Candice Falzon was famous for having sex with Sonny Bill Williams in the toilets of the Clovelly Hotel. She was 22 at the time. Williams was 21.
Falzon has spoken of how the publicity surrounding the incident led her to contemplate suicide, and how deeply she regretted it.
Warner knew all that. He didn’t — as some sportsmen seem to do — regard Candice as somehow “unmarriageable” because she wasn’t a virgin bride.
His own description of his emotional reaction to South African player Quinton de Kock’s unsavoury comments about Candice tells you a lot.
“A comment that was vile and disgusting about my wife, and in general about a lady, was quite poor, I felt,” Warner said last month, when his public confrontation with de Kock hit the news.
“My emotional response was just something that I don’t believe should have been said and I’ll always stick up for my family and in that case my teammates as well.”
As our writer Ben Horne reveals today, earlier in the same Test, Australia believed Quinton de Kock himself was rubbing the ball with his gloves to create reverse-swing — the exact same crime, although a little more subtle, that Warner later committed.
Provocation? You bet.
Yesterday in his SCG press conference, Warner made it clear, mainly through what he didn’t say, that he does not hold himself solely responsible for what happened.
He knows the Australian team has effectively sanctioned his aggressive tactics, including roughing up and smoothing balls, before now.
He also knows that if he tells the whole truth — that Darren Lehmann, Cricket Australia and the rest of the team knew precisely what he was doing and didn’t rein him in — he’ll never play Test cricket again.
We have not heard the end of this.
I first met Dave Warner nine years ago in his mum and dad’s Matraville housing commission property.
He was the scrappy little brother, the scallywag, the stocky blond charmer with a sweet high-school girlfriend and parents who gave him a terrible ribbing about all the attention coming his way.
Warner had just exploded on to the national stage with an incredible performance in grade cricket, switch-hitting his way into a career that would fulfil his whole family’s dreams.
That day in Matraville, dad Howard, mum Lorraine and big brother Steven Warner (who had himself been a promising cricketer) told how young Dave had made them so proud, despite being a naughty smart-arse who struggled to do as coaches told him — especially when the coach was his own dad.
Warner, at 23, was engaging and likeable. He enjoyed being ribbed by his parents. He was open and obviously desperate to bust the family out of poverty.
His big dream, he said, was to buy his parents their own home.
He fulfilled that dream, along with so many more: playing Test cricket for Australia, becoming a world-renowned athlete with a reputation for fierce competitiveness, a leader and an inspiration to kids just like himself.
He talked Prime Minister Tony Abbott into renovating the local park, which is now one of Sydney’s most impressive local sports facilities. He played aggressively and used every bit of his considerable charisma to further his ambition. He was rich, famous and successful; a self-made man whose word was his bond.
And, if you believe his detractors, he was also an arrogant prick, a bully, a manipulator and a cheat.
Both versions of David Warner are real. The qualities that drive him have also brought him low.
That’s the essence of tragedy: a hero cursed by his own fatal flaw. Will he allow it to defeat him, or will he conquer his lesser self, redeem himself, become the better man?