David Warner, along with Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft was in the eye of one of the most shameful incidents of cheating in Test cricket when it was found that Warner had told Bancroft to use sandpaper to alter the condition of the ball during the infamous 2018 Cape Town Test against South Africa.
This resulted in a huge uproar which saw the three men copping bans with Warner and Smith getting banned for one year each and Bancroft for nine months. All three of them made comebacks into the Australian team after that and Warner and Smith are still vital cogs of the Kangaroos team.
Though David Warner was considered the prime instigator for the whole incident, his manager James Erskine begs to differ and in a shocking revelation said that two unnamed executives had laid the foundation for what happened in Cape Town earlier in Hobart.
“When the truth comes out, everybody is going to turn around and say, ‘Well, why was David Warner picked upon? The truth will come out, let me tell you,” James Erskine told sports broadcaster SEN.
In the interview, he referenced an incident after a 2016 Test match in Hobart that Australia lost heavily to South Africa, suggesting it laid the foundations for what happened two years later in Cape Town.
“Two senior executives were in the changing room in Hobart and basically were berating the team for losing… and Warner said ‘we’ve got to reverse-swing the ball’ The only way we can reverse-swing the ball is by tampering with it. And they were told to do it,” Erskine claimed, without naming the officials or saying where they were from.
Erskine said that a day before after Warner withdrew his bid to overturn his lifetime captaincy ban on Wednesday, claiming a review panel wanted to subject him to “a public lynching”.
According to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, an unknown official who was also in the room said the team was told: “You’re paid to win not just to play.”
(AFP inputs)
