Former Australia spinner Stuart MacGill had a heated confrontation with podcast host Andre Menczel after he brought up a controversy involving David Warner’s wife, Candice, while discussing the 2018 sandpapergate scandal in South Africa.
The conversation started as a look back at Australia's 2018 tour of South Africa, but it soon turned into a nasty, intimate altercation in which MacGill lost his cool with his fellow podcaster.
Menczel's attempt to denounce the controversial abuse directed against Candice Warner—specifically, the notorious "Sonny Bill Williams masks" used by South African spectators to insult David Warner's wife—caused friction.
Menczel seemed to be supporting and denouncing the crowd's actions, but MacGill wasn't pleased to have the eight-year-old incident brought up and thoroughly examined.
In an impassioned reply on the Cricket Unfiltered Podcast, MacGill called Menczel a "f***ing idiot" and a "moron," claiming that by repeating the specifics of the taunting, the podcast was effectively re-traumatizing the subjects and intensifying the initial abuse.
The former Australian spinner believed that revisiting tragedies in detail would replicate the detrimental actions of those who caused them.
MacGill even threatened to "jump across the mic" and issued an ultimatum: if any part of the furious conversation was taken out of the recording, he would never work with the presenter again. MacGill suddenly left the podcast, leaving Menczel startled and speechless.
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The show ends, and then he goes off some more. Yells at me, calls me the 'C' word. Storm out the door, and I just say I'm going to release the episode. There's no way I'm going to sit on this apart from the fact that he was yelling at me to release the episode. And you think the way he was carrying on, he'd be begging me not to release it,” Menczel said about the incident.
“Then he was saying for me to bleep out Sonny Bill Williams' name because no one can hear the ex-footballer's name. What an absolute muppet he is. So, he leaves, I release it, and look, I was fine. I don't mind being called those things. I'm no shrinking violet,” he added.
