• Shock claim: Aussies told to tamper with ball

    Published on

    David Warner’s manager claims two senior Cricket Australia executives told players to tamper with the ball to make it reverse swing.

    This allegedly happened more than a year before Australia’s Cameron Bancroft was bust for ball-tampering during the third Test against the Proteas at Newlands.

    READ: How SuperSport cameramen caught Bancroft

    Captain Steve Smith and vice-captain Warner were found to be involved and all three players received lengthy bans from Cricket Australia.

    Smith also lost the captaincy to Tim Paine, but has led the team in two Tests in the past year when Pat Cummins was injured.

    On Wednesday, Warner withdrew a bid to overturn his lifetime Australian leadership ban, claiming an independent review panel wanted to “conduct a public lynching” and it would be traumatic for his family.

    On Thursday, Warner’s manager James Erskine went on SEN radio and took aim at Cricket Australia.

    “The truth will come out. There’s lots of people – there were two cricketers at the time who put their hand up and said ‘why don’t we just all tell the truth? They can’t fire all of us’,” Erskine said.

    “Two senior executives were in the changing room in Hobart [in late 2016] and basically were berating the team for losing against South Africa, and Warner said, ‘we’ve got to reverse swing the ball, and the only way to reverse swing the ball is basically by tampering with it’.

    “So they were told to do it.

    “You’d have to be a blind black Labrador to not realise there was far more than three people involved in this thing,” Erskine added. “They all got a canning, and David Warner was completely villainised.

    “He has shut up, he protected Cricket Australia, he protected his fellow players on my advice, because at the end of the day no one wanted to hear any more of it, and he’s got on playing cricket.

    “Why Cricket Australia couldn’t have done a very sensible thing and said ‘Listen, it’s not legal that someone doesn’t have a right of appeal’.

    “It’s just absurd, why should he have to go through that?

    “He has done everything he possibly could for Cricket Australia and for his team, and now he’s being treated like this … this is injustice at its greatest level.”

    Post by

    Simon Borchardt