Former Australia Test cricket captain Michael Clarke has lambasted his country's cricket board, Cricket Australia (CA) for their messy handling of David Warner's captaincy ban and accused the governing body of double standards. The trio of Australia's Warner, then captain Steve Smith and opener Cameron Bancroft were caught in the infamy of sandpaper gate in South Africa, in 2018. But it was only the Delhi Capitals' opener who got the short end of the stick with a lifetime captaincy ban.
While Smith has taken the field captaining his side now in the second Test against the West Indies on Thursday as skipper Pat Cummins is undergoing an injury, Warner's plight continues.
Warner sought for his ban to be lifted in the last ditch effort but gave all hope up this week on his appeal in an Instagram post making it clear that he did not want to make his family “the washing machine for cricket’s dirty laundry”.
The Aussie opener accused the independent review panel cobbled for his hearing of trying to make it "a public lynching"
Speaking in his defence is the 41-year-old Clarke for his former teammate and blasted Cricket Australia's lousy approach.
“You can tell he’s disappointed and frustrated,” Clarke said on Big Sports Breakfast.
“I think the other thing that probably hurts a little bit more is the fact Steve Smith is going to captain this Test match.” “I can understand Davey’s disappointment. In regards to where Davey is with his age, he’s unfortunately missed out on the captaincy opportunity in my opinion. I don’t think that’s the concern, it’s the fact it’s taken so long to process this or to get to where it’s at.
“I see it as very inconsistent. I find it very hard to believe it’s okay for one but not okay for the other to have a leadership role. If CA decided all the guys involved in what went down in South Africa, none of them were going to play a leadership role, I think that’s a fair call.”
Clarke feels Warner was the whipping boy and was the scapegoat for the incident that happened in 2018.
“But if it’s okay for one, if it’s okay for Smithy, it’s got to be ok for (Cameron) Bancroft and it’s got to be okay for Warner.
“I don’t know if it’s fair to make David Warner the complete scapegoat and say everyone else can go back to normal. We’ll forgive you but we won’t forgive Davey.”
Clarke further said he wasn’t 100 per cent supportive of any of the three being involved in a leadership role and that the scandal would linger until they retire.
“There’s so much around how that was handled that was just not the right way,” Clarke said.
“Starting from doing the crime – let’s start there. How does it go away, don’t say anything. (Former South African captain) Faf du Plessis just wrote a book and it’s in his book.
“The fact that there’s (only) bits and pieces of what went down is out there to protect so many people is the problem with all of this. If they want to make it public, the whole lot should be made public from start to finish. If it keeps coming up how do you move on? How does cricket move on? “Unfortunately for this Australian team, a lot of players that were involved then are involved now. So really it seems that until they retire this is just going to keep coming up because there’s so many questions around what went down,” Clarke concluded.
