AUSSIES FEELING THE HEAT
DAVID WARNER is facing a chastening question ... if he wants to reboard the SS Australia does he really want to torpedo it midships?
If Cricket Australia officials were nervous before Warner’s cringe-worthy, heavily stagemanaged press conference on Saturday, they are even more so now.
Warner, banned from cricket for a year after orchestrating Australia’s ball tampering antics in the Cape Town Test, did not give much away at his media call, but two key messages floated out of the rabble.
The fact he refused to deny there had been tampering with the ball in matches before the Cape Town Test left strong suspicions that this was not a one-off incident.
And the fact he would not clear other players from the blame may indicate that, in his opinion, others knew what happened in Cape Town.
Had no one known, or had there never been other ball tampering, he could have comfortably spoken out defending himself and the rest of the players.
Instead he retreated to some painfully rehearsed lines that provoked more questions than they answered.
The fact he kept his bat so close to his pad was a strong hint he would appeal his sentence.
Where he goes from there is a worry for Cricket Australia and a potential source of major embarrassment.
An inquiry supervised by Cricket Australia high performance manager Pat Howard and signed off on by chief executive James Sutherland found only the three players suspended — Warner, Cameron Bancroft and captain Steve Smith — knew about the ball tampering.
If Warner starts naming others it would undermine the credibility of that inquiry.
There are also several awkward grey areas such as the broad issue of Australia tampering with the ball earlier in this series and even in past series.
There may be a chance Warner will talk about players knowing about ball tampering within the side in past Tests who were not specifically aware of the hastily organised incident in Cape Town.
Bancroft was caught after AB de Villiers spotted what he thought was Warner tampering with the ball earlier in the series.
He sent a text message to his former captain Graeme Smith, now a television commentator, and cameramen were ordered to specifically focus on the path from keeper Tim Paine to the bowler.
The issue for Warner is that if he is going to tell all and implicate others in the hope that his plight should be more sympathetically treated, that will only turn his teammates further against him.