Warner and Smith reflect on comeback

DAVID Warner told teammates he had reflected on how to be a better team person in his first meeting with Australian players after the balltampering ban last year.

Warner and Steve Smith’s comebacks are a key subject of an eight-part documentary labelled The Test, will be released on Amazon tonight.

The pair’s first meeting back with the team — in Dubai last March — is shown in detail, which proved a key component for their returns in both the World Cup and Ashes.

In the meeting, Smith admitted to teammates he at times felt like walking away from the game during the year-long suspension. Warner also said he had completed plenty of self-reflection in his time away, but believed he was returning to a different team than the one he left in South Africa a year earlier.

“In the last 12 months I have had a lot of reflecting to do,” Warner said in the Dubai meeting. “With cricket and what happened in the past and getting better as a team person as well.

“Looking from the outside in you can see the whole team as a we have grown a lot.

“How we have been accepted in the past 24 hours. I don’t really feel like I’ve left.

“There was no unease or anything like that. It was back like I went out of the team yesterday and came back today.”

Meanwhile, Smith’s frank admission came just months before one of the greatest Ashes series off all time, where he hit 774 runs at an average of 110.57 “From a personal point of view it was pretty tough and I’ve had times where I probably didn’t want to come back and play to be perfectly honest,” Smith said in the meeting.