David Warner cricket captaincy ban: Candice Warner weighs in on saga

Candice Warner has revealed how Cricket Australia has put her and her family through hell since 2018 and spoken of the vicious abuse their three daughters continue to cop.

Candice Warner has revealed how Cricket Australia has put her and her family “through hell” by dragging out a disastrous process to review husband David Warner’s leadership ban for nearly 12 months.

In a passionate address on Triple M’s summer breakfast show this morning, Candice Warner outlined how distressing it has been for her family – and for Warner’s Australian teammates – to have the events of the 2018 Sandpapergate scandal dragged back to the surface by a prolonged process right in the middle of the Test summer.

David Warner released a forthright statement on the eve of the second Test in Adelaide to declare he was withdrawing from the process for the sake of his family, and was backed by his wife on Thursday morning.

“Oh most definitely. We’ve lived with this pain, through this pain since 2018,” said Candice Warner.

“And it gets to a point where enough is enough.

“Dave’s statement was very powerful and it had to be.

“I refer to his statement where he says family comes first. There’s more important things than cricket and (David) is fiercely protective of his family and he just couldn’t … there are more important things than cricket and that’s the bottom line.

“We have been through hell.

“To put our family, also his teammates through everything again and the disappointing thing for David is this has been dragged out for so long.

“Everything first kicked off in February and it’s now December and still no decision.”

David Warner with his wife, Candice, and their kids after the Sydney Thunder Big Bash League, Cricket Press Conference, 21 August 2022. Picture: Ian Bird/CNSW.

The 37-year-old was clearly emotional as she reflected on the past year.

“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.”

Cricket Australia was on Warner’s side in not wanting the review to become public, but the process had been derailed by lawyers and counsel who wanted a public “cleansing” of the events of 2018.

Candice described the process as “a joke”.

“The fact that it wanted to be public … in whose best interests is it for this to become public?” she said.

“Is it for David, for the team, or for the panel’s best interests? The fact they used words like cleansing to me is a joke.

“That’s not what he wanted and I don’t think it’s what Cricket Australia wanted either. But the panel was very adamant that they wanted it public.”

Candice Warner and David Warner.

The Australian team is preparing for a Test match in Adelaide. Candice said the players were fed up with the distraction Cricket Australia caused by running the process through the summer, when there were months during the off-season when it could have been dealt with.

“Enough is enough. David has had enough, the team has had enough and it’s just time to move on now and just to get on with playing cricket. We’ve all heard too much for too long,” she said.

Candice said her husband was hurt by the way the prolonged process made it look like he was campaigning for captaincy, when for him, the review was more a matter of principle that he did not deserve to be banned for life.

“He is getting on in age so there was never any expectation that he was going to captain but if there was an opportunity he would have loved to have taken it,” she said.

“That’s the other thing, through this whole process it’s looked like, they’ve made it out like David was campaigning to be captain but that’s not the case at all.

“He was asked a lot of questions because it just kept going on and on and he just answered the questions like he would. But there was definitely no campaigning to be captain from Dave’s end.”

Originally published as David Warner cricket captaincy ban: Candice Warner weighs in on saga