Suffer no more: Steve Smith, David Warner and a hope that healing can begin
Steve Smith and David Warner will be treated as they would have been before their lives crashing down. That is, as the all-format world class cricketers they were. But the Poms sure won’t make it easy for them.
Australia’s cricket powerbrokers have decided enough is enough: Steve Smith and David Warner should suffer no more.
The Daily Telegraph understands a highly significant move has been made behind the scenes to reinstate the superstars, who officially returned to the Australian camp on Thursday, on roughly similar money to what they were earning before the ball-tampering scandal.
While the former top two seeds might have dropped down a few places on the contract list with Pat Cummins tipped to have again been ranked the country’s $2 million-No. 1 man; the deposed captain and vice-captain are understood to be back floating around the top five spots.
This development that they’re set to return on contracts estimated to be worth north of $1.5 million comes just months after there was speculation they might be forced to scrap their way back and not receive a central CA contract at all.
More recently, it was tipped they might be ranked on middle-of-the-road contracts as an attempt to strike a balance and not rock the boat too much with existing players who had been filling the void in their absence.
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However, CA has made the noteworthy decision there will be no double-jeopardy. No more million-dollar haircuts. They’re back towards the pointy end.
It’s been estimated Smith and Warner lost an astronomical $7 million each over the course of their unprecedented 12 months in exile, where they were abandoned by personal sponsors (one even demanded money back) and had their Cricket Australia and Indian Premier League contracts torn up.
But Smith and Warner will be treated again as they would have been before their lives crashed down around them.
That is, as the all-format world class cricketers they were, and not the banned outcasts they became.
Punishments have been served. Now they’re back in the fray.
This attitude reflects a wider philosophy Australia’s World Cup chargers have been implored to embrace.
Smith and Warner are back. The team has been picked around them. Now, let’s get on with it.
THE TEAM ABOVE THE INDIVIDUAL
Those close to the team maintain the reintegration mission that awaits Australia in England this year is “workable” despite the well-documented fractures that were laid bare in Cape Town.
This cautious optimism that they are a team once more is backed up by the one-day side’s outstanding recent form, which came amid the backdrop that two seats were being kept warm for Smith and Warner, looming large on the horizon.
However, to get to the point where all the main players from South Africa are back under the one roof, has required cricket’s version of intensive “marriage counselling”.
Over the past few weeks and months all players and staff have met individually and in small groups and have been given the chance to get all their dirty laundry out in the open.
‘Say your piece, talk it out like men’ has been the message. It’s understood that in a lot of ways it’s been a helpful — not to mention an entirely necessary — healing process.
The reintegration meetings (of which there are more to come in Brisbane this week) have been viewed as an opportunity for most people who were involved to actually properly deal with the seismic events that pushed the organisation to breaking point 12 months ago.
Shoehorning Smith and Warner back in without an honesty session to end all honesty sessions could have been a recipe for an unmitigated disaster.
The reality is, it wasn’t as simple as the dressing room once again embracing Smith and Warner.
QUESTIONS REMAIN UNANSWERED
There is an almost unanimous belief around the game that taking Cricket Australia’s investigation as gospel — that Smith, Warner and Cameron Bancroft were the only three individuals who should shoulder blame — would be naive in the extreme.
What level of backside covering went on by others in the set-up? Did everyone interviewed in Cape Town tell the whole story? Was it true that one member of the XI was extremely keen to be interviewed and wasn’t? Did it also happen in the previous Test, as alleged by South African star AB De Villiers?
Could bowlers not have known something was happening to the ball they were bowling with? Warner had originally opted out of being the team attack dog, so should anyone take responsibility for dragging him back in?
The introduction of sandpaper might have been a tightly confined secret, but what other conversations went on about, ‘how do we make the ball swing sooner?’
Many claim there must have been a wider understanding or knowledge within the dressing room, at least on some level.
Chatter about were South Africa cheating? Were that team cheating? So how can we get better at working the ball?
The fact that reverse swing hasn’t been sighted in Test cricket since Cape Town suggests something more had been going on in the majority of international teams than what’s been admitted to by current players, including Australians.
It was an unsavoury episode to say the least and Smith, Warner and Bancroft will have to wear it for the rest of their lives.
It’s as much about them accepting that perceived sense of injustice that they had to carry the can for everyone, than it is about teammates accepting them back.
Warner was advised by his manager that as part of his road to forgiveness he should ring up every other player and apologise for his actions, even if that meant putting to one side a feeling they knew more than they had let on.
MANAGING THE DRESSING ROOM
No one is pretending that everyone is going to return to being best pals, and will ride off into the sunset together again when it’s all said and done.
In any dressing room environment, there are always going to be differences of opinion and times when relationships might not be as strong.
But Australian players preparing for five and a half months of fierce World Cup and Ashes battle in the hot bed of English crowds have signed off on an unmitigated team policy that Smith and Warner have done their punishment.
The fact Warner was banished from South Africa on a separate flight to Smith last year, yet flew into Brisbane on Thursday alongside bowlers Mitchell Starc, Cummins and Nathan Lyon was symbolic of that.
They’re back; and the resolve of all parties to embrace this commitment has underlined Australia’s preparation for their World Cup defence.
Cricket Australia has put an exhaustive amount of time and resources into reintegrating the team and preparing all involved for the jungle they’re about to enter in the UK.
Led by independent facilitators Tim Ford and Ben Crowe and head coach Justin Langer, the work done behind the scenes has helped strengthen the team’s focus.
The leadership and steadying influence of one-day captain Aaron Finch and Test skipper Tim Paine has been described as exemplary.
Insiders believe the team is now in a position where they agree on what matters and what doesn’t and they have developed a greater understanding of what noise should be listened to and what needs to be blocked out.
If players are alert to the blow-by-blow details of the scrutiny they are about to be subjected to in the UK, they will quickly come undone.
Players have been told not to buy into gossip and innuendo that might otherwise be distracting.
In South Africa, it was this subtext of personal insults and grubby behaviour that sent Warner, and arguably Smith, spiralling out of control.
The Australian team were guilty of letting outside forces permeate their sense of being and this time a premium has been put on ensuring that won’t happen again.
England’s notorious Barmy Army is not renowned for playing by the rules.
Steve Waugh once stopped a tour match in Somerset in 1997 due to personal abuse Shane Warne was copping on the boundary-line about his daughter.
Mitchell Johnson melted on the 2009 Ashes tour under the weight of the barrage from English fans.
In the immediate wake of the Cape Town scandal, the Barmy Army sung vile lyrics on England’s tour of New Zealand which disgracefully attacked Warner’s wife, Candice Warner, a similar theme to what she was cruelly subjected to in South Africa.
A Barmy Army spokesman admitted to The Daily Telegraph that the slur on Candice was wrong and wouldn’t happen again. But how do you control the mob?
Cricket Australia will head to England armed with a more comprehensive than usual security presence and also a larger fleet of media strategists to be on top of any potential scenario that might arise.
SPECIAL CASES, BUT NO SPECIAL TREATMENT
Smith and Warner won’t speak publicly until there is an event — like blasting a century — which provides a more natural reason for them to break their silence. They have not been gagged, but CA and their management believe their actions will speak louder than their words which will always risk being thrown at the mercy of subjective interpretation.
It’s clear that Smith and Warner and their families arrive in England with a much higher profile than anyone else in the team, but the two men themselves have privately insisted they do not want to be treated any differently.
They are part of a team and so what’s good for the rest of the team should be good for them.
Players gathered in camp in Brisbane this week will continue their work on coping skills, knowing full well they’re about to jump into the frying pan.
Langer will take his side to Gallipoli en route to England, to honour the troops first and foremost, but also to continue an effort to make the former ‘bubble boys’ of cricket more aware they’re part of a bigger world and that perspective can be their greatest asset.
Warner has just peeled off 611 runs in 11 IPL matches. Smith has defied serious elbow surgery to also find his way back into form.
In the emotional aftermath of Cape Town some questioned whether Smith and Warner could ever return.
But in the cold light of day it was clear they remain, as they were before the war, the first-picked in any Australian team.
Their teammates, no matter what has transpired, are also elite athletes who play to win.
What is good for the dressing room must come first.
It’s on these foundations that Australia believes they can do the impossible in England.
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