Cricket Australia must show leadership and bring Warner in from the cold

David Warner in the lead-up to Australia’s T20 World Cup defence. Picture: Getty Images.

That David Warner, eh? Always making trouble for Cricket Australia. First it was by misbehaving; in more recent times, perversely, it has been by behaving so well.

As Australia’s long-time white-ball captain Aaron Finch edges towards the exit, nobody would make a more natural and assured successor than Warner. He is vastly experienced, batting, fielding and scheming as well as ever, and uniformly respected by his comrades, who even seem to be subtly standing aside to make way for him. The most offensive thing about Australia’s all-format opening batter is his moustache.

Yet, as we know, Warner also languishes under an open-ended leadership ban, reflecting the indelible stain on his permanent record – and there can be no sidestepping the original misdeed. About him, nobody is neutral, everyone perhaps a little ambivalent – such is the burden of the burnish of celebrity.

CA’s board spent Friday hastening, slowly as ever, towards consideration of Warner’s position, which would entail a revision of its integrity statutes by allowing players to appeal sanctions already accepted.

While a big deal has been made of the legal implications of such a review, it would open the world’s tiniest floodgate. The vast bulk of sanctions are obediently served; as far as I’m aware, the CA life ban club has a membership of one.

CA, too, has already set a precedent for second looks at things. Just ask Tim Paine: for private purposes innocent; for public consumption guilty.

So, what to do?

Egregious as it was, Sandpapergate is not to be considered in isolation: as the Ethics Centre concluded, it was “not an aberration” but “an extreme example of a latent tendency growing out of the prevailing culture of men’s cricket in Australia”. It extended a continuum of malpractice that the Australian team in general, and Warner in particular, had been indulged in exploring.

Coaches and officials had steadily weaponised Warner’s natural combativeness, in the conviction, frankly repulsive, that Australia was harder to beat when its players were obnoxious.

The spontaneity and unanimity of the community reaction revealed an unsuspected underlying discontent about this: we’ve long suspected you were going too far, said the public; now you really have. Four-and-a-half years on, there are arguments it is possible to make that at the time would have been derided.

Warner, to be sure, failed the game. But the game, I think, also failed Warner, CA having fallen well short of its duty of care to provide him with a) responsible leadership and b) a decent workplace in South Africa.

Sport can never be a truly safe environment for any participant. But it was pathetic the way official faces were turned from the abuse rained on undeserving Candice Warner on that 2018 tour. And had it been any other player’s wife suffering so, I suspect, representations on their behalf would have been far more strenuous.

To me it felt as though the Warners were abandoned before Sandpapergate almost as utterly as David was abandoned afterwards.

There wasn’t a single CA executive on the spot as the team’s siege mentality, further aggravated by the ICC’s abysmal mishandling of disciplinary action against Kagiso Rabada, visibly worsened; they were, literally, asleep on the other side of the world as the press conference by Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft deepened the players’ predicament.

Not only, then, did Warner, Smith and Bancroft pay for their misdemeanours. They also paid for the failings of their elders, who had urged them on at every turn, let them operate in an environment of ethical elasticity and impunity – until they no longer could.

That said, CA generally judged the sentences well. The public mood for exemplary justice had to be met.

That the suspensions imposed on the trio were in the ballpark was reflected in the general consent that followed: a later quibble from the Australian Cricketers’ Association aside, nobody called for their relaxation or truncation.

The players took that hint, prudently and helpfully waived their right to appeal, then served their time solemnly – of the three, Warner most of all, being the only one of the trio to have apologised to South Africa (pretty manful, all things considered), and the only one not to have invited the media into his penance (pretty mature, given the temptations).

This considerably simplified their return to the colours and the restoration generally of Australia’s good name, projects that have been disarmingly successful. Job done – save in one respect …

Like several aspects of the disciplinary process, it has never been entirely clear why the additional penalty of a leadership ban was imposed on Warner, except in so far as it was expedient to isolate him as instigator of a one-off ploy, thereby deflecting attention from other individuals and earlier incidents, and perhaps to repay him for trenchant comments during CA’s pay dispute with the players preceding Sandpapergate.

Little was thought of the ban at the time because, I fancy, it was assumed Warner would not return – that when his exile ended he would mooch off into a lucrative domestic T20 sunset. Perhaps that thought crossed his mind. But, with typical cussedness, he took the harder road – and it genuinely was.

There is no worse mantle to bear in sport than “cheat”. It can send you crazy: witness Lance Armstrong, still veering from self-conscious soul-bearing to nauseating impenitence. And more generally never underestimate the challenge of walking on to a field or entering a room where everyone knows and hold views about you – it has been Warner’s lot almost for as long as it has not.

There is a commercial argument to Warner’s rehabilitation: he is a natural; he is box office. It shouldn’t be a determinant. But there is a public facing aspect of the ban.

It is anomalous and disproportionate in a world that pardons and winks at so much to impose a lifetime sentence for anything. It is holding cricketers to higher standards than public officials; it is mindless obstinacy to insist on the continuation of anything because it has been decided once. Justice needs to be tempered by mercy.

There will be a lobby that favours the continuation of the ban, that never wanted Warner back in the first place, that likes to bloviate in newspaper comments sections about having turned their back on cricket, making a moral posture of their routine uninterest.

Fine, let them. The world turns. CA sent a strong message 4½ years ago by suspending Warner and his co-conspirators; it can send an equally strong message – that forgiveness is possible where redress has been made – by rescinding his leadership ban.