Cricket Australia must lift Warner’s leadership ban

There is one – and only one – way that Cricket Australia’s leaders Nick Hockley and Lachlan Henderson can dig themselves out of the hole created by the mess of David Warner’s lifetime leadership ban.

Abandon the frankly ridiculous legal processes around the question of removing the ban, and say that CA’s board has chosen to rescind Warner’s suspension because it was the same body that insisted upon it in 2018.

This outcome would be humiliating for chief executive Hockley, having led a longwinded “parole” process that has ultimately stumbled down a blind alley where independent commissioners Alan Sullivan, Robert Heath and Adrian Anderson have allowed it to become a retrial.

It would also expose chair Henderson and the board to accusations of burying the 2018 ball-tampering scandal at Newlands when there remains much still to be known about it all.

In the public mind, this information is loaded with weight because of the enormous penalties handed down to Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft five years ago and the idea that others with similar if not total knowledge were able to avoid censure. Usman Khawaja’s dressing room assertion that the team should have taken collective responsibility still stands out.

As does Greg Chappell’s admission that all participants in Australian cricket at the time were guilty in some way or another.

David Warner has withdrawn from the process to review his leadership ban.Credit:AP

But the removal of Warner’s ban would at the very least bring some measure of closure to an affair that has caused untold damage to the game that Hockley, Henderson and the other directors purport to serve.

At the same time, it would be the first occasion in quite some time when CA’s leaders took genuine ownership of the issue, instead of hiding behind process and procedural details as has too often been the case lately.

One of the most pertinent reflections of the past 24 hours was that of a former CA director who conceded that the board should never have allowed responsibility for Warner’s leadership ban to be handballed to its integrity unit. Doing so meant that any revisitation of the matter would be about much more than Warner alone and instead encompass the conduct code.

Without such an arrangement, Hockley and CA’s head of integrity Jacqui Partridge have bounced between barristers and other legal minds to find a solution to a problem that shouldn’t even exist, had the 2018 board fully appreciated its existing power to veto captaincy recommendations from the selectors.

The morass of legal letters and submissions that have flown around since Warner’s application for relief from his ban on November 25 are an indication that in trying not to make it too easy for the former vice-captain to again be eligible for captaincy, CA got hopelessly lost in the weeds of an issue with a simple principle at heart.

Another senior figure involved in the process admitted on Thursday that had Warner, his family and his support network known the saga was going to get this messy a year ago, they would honestly have preferred to get a curt “no” from CA and moved on. It’s been that dispiriting.

In reality, Warner’s lifetime leadership ban was effectively rendered moot the moment a culture review of CA was released a mere eight months after the scandal had broken. That review spread blame far and wide, more so even than James Erskine has done in an incendiary radio interview this week.

CA’s acceptance of the review’s findings was underlined when Henderson announced this year that its author, Simon Longstaff, would become the governing body’s ethics commissioner. Undoubtedly, Longstaff would recommend that Warner’s ban be seen not through narrow legal prisms but down the broad avenue of basic fairness.

That’s why Warner’s ban should be ended by the CA board, preferably before this Test match ends. Anything less would dig the hole deeper. There has been more than enough shovelling already.

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