He's Back

GH thinks that justice is served

Know your scriptures?  The appropriate citation - King James Version, of course - is surely Luke 15:7: ‘I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.’ For it says something that the Cricket New South Wales email welcoming the decision to revoke David Warner’s leadership ban….

….actually landed slightly before Cricket Australia’s announcement of the decision itself.

Sydney Thunder was cc’d in, as it were, with Trent Copeland emerging to reiterate the testimony he provided at last week’s private hearing: ‘It’s had a profound impact on him and certain behaviours, if you will, prior to 2018 that Dave was referencing, and … the sledging or the other things that might come naturally to professional cricket, there’s been a real line in the sand that just does not appear any more with David Warner on a cricket field.’ Copeland’s next announcement will surely be of Warner’s appointment as the Thunder’s captain.

In the meantime, importantly, panellists Alan Sullivan KC, Jeff Gleeson KC, and Jane Seawright were convinced that Australia’s highest scoring opening batter deserved an early 38th birthday present: ‘Warner’s conduct and behaviour since the imposition of the sanction has been excellent and he appears to have made a substantial change, one example of which is that he no longer sledges or tries to provoke the opposing team. The review panel is more than satisfied that Mr Warner will not engage in any conduct similar to that which occurred in 2018 which resulted in the sanction and that the sanction has thus had the relevant quality of specific deterrence.’

I confess I find this logic elusive, although perhaps it is a further jink in Australian cricket’s long and ambivalent relationship with sledging: now, it seems, a player’s on-field garrulity has been deemed predictive of their potential for greater malpractice. But I also think that this decision serves the greater good.  The suspensions on Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft were generally condign, but the ‘leadership ban’ on Warner always gratuitous.  It was imposed by the CA board without elaboration or justification.  It served no purpose save concentrating further odium and innuendo on Warner.  It has gone on inflicting needless hurt and humiliation on the cricketer and his family. 

From it we were meant to draw the inference that Warner was the sole instigator of Sandpapergate on, frankly, no more than a ‘that’d be right’ basis.  Yet Sandpapergate was clearly a conspiracy, about which two questions remained to be answered: how numerous were the conspirators, and how they failed to understand their conspiracy as against both the letter and the spirit of cricket’s law.  Only the latter of these has been explored in even a cursory way: the Longstaff review of the culture of Australian cricket identified profound ethical slippage in the pursuit not only of the national team’s on-field success but CA’s off-field organisational goals.  The former goes on pending.

The desire for resolution of this is understandable.  It reared its head two and a half years ago when Warner first sought a review of the ban, and CA’s overmighty ‘independent’ assessors proposed escalating what should have been the equivalent of a parole board hearing to the level of a full-scale, open-season truth and reconciliation commission. Warner, I think rightly, abandoned what would have been a public retrial.  Why volunteer to be put through twice what he had submitted to once?  I wrote at the time:

Whatever one may have thought about CA’s response to Sandpapergate five years ago, it was prompt and exemplary.  How does a partial review of that response now essentially require nine months of legal to and fro, rolling on into the middle of a Test series, and remain incomplete?  

This is not a corporation mired in legislation and regulation.  This is not a government accountable to an electorate, funded by donors.  CA is an autarchy, a monopoly.  In its domain, it enjoys absolute authority.  Yet somehow it appears afraid of its own shadow.

How this convoluted mission creep transpired may or may not emerge, and now, arguably, it hardly matters.  The reality is that cricket has, yet again, been made to look ridiculous, and incapable of performing basic functions of its own account.

CA have done better this time.  You can point to the incentive that Warner’s rehabilitation furthers CA’s commercial purpose of securing his complete engagement in the Big Bash League; more charitably, you can observe that the quality of mercy is not strained.  On the cricket field at least, Warner has remained the right side of trouble; whatever his motivation, that ought to mean something.

It’s mostly chance that the remission of Warner’s sentence should have coincided with him throwing his helmet into the ring for a Test recall, as Australia grapples with his absence.  The response was mainly derision, although not from me.  Yes, it would be a retrograde step; yes, Australia, with another opening batter approaching pensionable age, needs to focus on the future.  But I can’t help saluting such ironclad confidence - Warner’s imperishable sense that he is the answer whatever the question; Warner’s Krusty-like propensity for saying the quiet parts loud.  If everyone had a sane estimation of their powers and knew when they were done, if everybody exercised tact, proportion and restraint….well, sport would be a boring place indeed.  To quote Ecclesiastes 3:1: ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’