Cricket Australia let Steve Smith and David Warner down, says WACA chief Christine Matthews

WACA chief executive Christina Matthews believes Steve Smith and David Warner were let down by Australian cricket.

David Warner and wife Candice arrive back in Australia after the Cape Town incident

WACA chief executive Christina Matthews, the woman who stood by Cameron Bancroft’s side on his return from the sandpaper scandal in South Africa, believes that Steve Smith and David Warner were “let down” by Australian cricket.

Matthews said the lack of support for Warner in South Africa, when his wife was the subject of vicious attacks by fans and administrators, was “disgraceful”.

In a forthright interview on this week’s Cricket Et Cetera podcast, the former player and respected administrator held forth on many topics, but was most outspoken about the way the game failed the NSW pair.

She also revealed that, leading up to the Cape Town incident, state chief executives had been warning for some time that the team’s culture was out of hand, but were told that as long as the side was winning there would be no intervention.

That “win at any cost” attitude was flushed out to some degree by the cultural review and while Smith and Warner are back in the fold, Bancroft has been left in the care of Western Australian cricket after losing his national contract.

Many assumed Matthews was Bancroft’s mother when she sat by his side as he fielded questions on returning to begin his nine month ban after the events at Cape Town in 2018.

Matthews said Bancroft is now doing well after a period of “incredible grieving”.

“Cam Bancroft, I think, is doing OK, it was pleasing to see him get a hundred in this Shield game, he’s got hundreds prior to Christmas as well,” she said.

“I think he has still got to get some of his technique right in terms of how he plays, but he seems like he is starting to come to terms with things a bit.

“We asked a lot of those players who were involved in sandpapergate, particularly Cameron who was only a young player within that environment. While he presented a brave face when he came back he would have been facing many demons and I think it is a matter of continual support with him.”

Matthews believes the opening batsman was ignored on return.

“We knew that he wasn’t important in the scheme of things from a Cricket Australia point of view and once he came back to WA they’d almost forget about him, so we knew if we didn’t look after him no one was going to,” she said.

“Things were a bit of a mess at that time within Cricket Australia and so we just focused on getting him back, helping him get through those first few days and then helping him just get through.

“It was an incredible grieving process for him.”

Asked why she chose to sit beside Bancroft she asked why nobody had thought to do the same for Warner and Smith when they faced the media in the days that followed.

“I felt a lot of people let David and Steve down, that’s not to say they were not responsible for what happened, but to not have a Cricket Australia representative or an ACA (Australian Cricketers Association) representative sitting with them, particularly when they’d seen what we did with Cameron, I just thought that showed a lack of emotional intelligence and I think that’s pretty sad,” Matthews told Cricket Et Cetera.

“There were a number of times I wanted to contact both Steve and David because I knew them from Cricket NSW (where she was a general manager prior to accepting the WA job in 2012) but ultimately I decided to stay in my lane and not get too involved and just look after Cameron.”

Matthews added that Warner and his wife Candice were basically left to their own devices despite the vile abuse they received in South Africa.

“In the lead-up to it David Warner had not been protected very well. The stuff that was happening with his wife in South Africa, I thought was disgraceful and I don’t know that Cricket Australia did as much as they could to protect him and to keep him safe,” she said.

Candice Warner revealed later that she discovered she was pregnant in Cape Town, but lost the baby soon after.

“The miscarriage was a tragic consequence, a heartbreaking end to a horror tour,” she told Australian Women’s Weekly. “Like so many families who’ve experience a miscarriage, it’s just really sad.

“The entire ordeal from the public humiliations to the ball tampering had taken its toll and, from that moment, we decided nothing will impact our lives like that again.”