AUSTRALIA: In a shocking admission, James Erskine, manager of David Warner, asserted that Cricket Australia (CA) administrators had permitted players to tamper with the ball more than a year before the sandpaper gate incident in the Cape Town Test of 2018 broke out.
According to Erskine, the players received the okay from “two executives” after losing a Test match to South Africa in Hobart in late 2016.
Then, for their roles in the 2018 event, captain Steve Smith and his sidekick Warner received one-year suspensions, while opener Cameron Bancroft received a nine-month punishment.
Warner was identified as the mastermind of the incident that occurred in Cape Town in March and was prohibited from holding a leadership position for the duration of his professional life.
Erskine said that two top executives “were really berating the players for losing against South Africa” in the locker room in Hobart.
Warner suggested that we must reverse-swing the ball. They were instructed to do so: “We have to tamper with the ball in order to reverse-swing it.”
In the Hobart Test, Australia was dismissed for 85 runs in the first innings, and later, South Africa’s Faf du Plessis was found guilty of ball-tampering.
Erskine did not specifically mention that the executives involved were from CA, but he did say that Warner had “shut up,” and “protected Cricket Australia, he protected his other players… because at the end of the day, no one wanted to hear any more of it and he’s got on playing cricket.”
Warner had been “totally villainized,” according to Erskine, who called the sandpaper gate controversy “injustice at its highest degree” and said “there were far more than three people involved in this event.”
CA has not yet addressed Erskine’s accusations. Darren Lehmann, an Australian coach at the time, resigned due to the sandpaper incident, even though he was found innocent.
The ball-tampering controversy was “partially CA’s fault,” according to an internal investigation.
Warner withdrew his plea to remove his lifetime leadership ban on Wednesday, claiming he was unwilling to let his family serve as the “washing machine for cricket’s dirty clothes” and that the independent review panel wanted him to undergo “public lynching.”
Michael Clarke, a former captain of Australia, defended Warner and said that the cricket association of his nation had adopted a “double standard” in addressing the scandal-related captaincy ban, making the opener the “scapegoat” in the process.
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