Watson backing Warner to lead

CHANGES are coming for Australia’s T20 side after a failed World Cup campaign and Ricky Ponting has anointed Glenn Maxwell as the “logical” choice to take over as captain.

However, Shane Watson said there was only one man for the job and he slammed Cricket Australia and the “bureaucracy of Australian cricket” for failing to overturn David Warner’s leadership ban to allow him to take over.

Captain Aaron Finch, who watched his team’s final game from the sidelines with a hamstring injury, is likely to add T20 retirement to his exit from the one-day game.

Australia doesn’t play its next T20 international until next August and Finch, 35, said he wouldn’t rush a decision.

Matthew Wade, who deputised for Finch, had already said the T20 tournament would be his last international foray.

Watson, who is on the board of the Australian Cricketers Association, has slammed the sport’s governing body for dithering over Warner’s lifetime ban for his involvement in the sandpaper scandal in 2018.

“I’ve had an opinion on who should have been the shortterm T20 World Cup captain for a while, and that’s David Warner,” Watson said.

“But that seems to have been caught up in the bureaucracy of Australian cricket because of a couple of lines of a code of conduct legal document.

“How hard is it to change one or two lines in a legal document to make sure that someone who has paid for his mistakes and then some (can captain the side)?

However, Ponting said Maxwell, who has captained the Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash and the Kings XI Punjab in the Indian Premier League, was the obvious choice because of Warner’s leadership ban.

“He’s done a fair bit in IPL and in BBL,” Ponting said. “I think that’s probably the logical one.”