LEHMANN ON BRINK, NO TEARS FOR WARNER

THE question is no longer whether David Warner deserves to be banned, it’s whether he deserves to come back.

Warner is set to face a lengthy ban for his role as the prime architect of the ball tampering affair and it will be a sentence well deserved.

When that bans ends, two questions will need to be answered: does he still want to play for Australia, and does it really want him back? Both are vexed issues.

Steve Smith has these challenges as well, but for some reason, for all of his squabbles with senior teammates he threw under a bus, there is a feeling he will slip back into the national team somewhere.

Perhaps Smith will play the senior professional role Ricky Ponting performed after he stood down as captain but continued to play.

But Warner’s future is more complex.

When Warner was made vicecaptain of his country one of the prime reasons for his elevation was the fear that if he missed out on the job he could potentially be a disruptive influence on the side.

Better to have him inside the tent firing the bullets into the distance than the other way round, they thought.

It was flawed logic by the selectors and the board, and Australia now confronts the scenario it dreaded — Warner being banned for a long time then returning as an isolated, potentially angry man to a team trying to create a new image.

If Warner did play another Test it would not be as a senior leader, but as a relic of a stained era and you wonder how he would jell with a team trying to move on from the mess he helped create.

The wounds from this issue will be deep and long-lasting. Players and coaches have turned against each other. Long-term friendships are being smashed like a dropped glasses on a bar-room floor.

When Warner is banned, there will not be a single tear shed in the offices of Cricket Australia where many of the high-ranking staff cannot stand him.

And they have never forgotten the way he taunted Cricket Australia during the pay dispute, showing a cringing lack of appreciation for what it had done for him and how it had tolerated his excesses.

CA officials have also had enough of the bluff around Warner’s public image. Last summer he had a press conference saying how disappointed he was in Faf du Plessis’s ball tampering, and how disappointed he would be if it ever happened in the Australian side. A year later he is doing the deed himself.

One minute he is being portrayed as “The Reverend” with a moral compass somewhere between Mother Teresa and the Pope.

The next he is bombarding South African keeper-batsman Quinton de Kock with offensive sledges until the South African finally cracks and goes below the belt.

Cricket fans don’t mind rebels and they don’t mind do-gooders, but they do struggle to accept it when they come in the one self-righteous, flipflopping, two-toned package.

Cricket Australia knew Warner’s style well when it made him vicecaptain.

Sometimes in life you get what you deserve.