David Warner's team-mates really annoyed about handling of leadership review: ACA CEO

Adelaide, Dec 9 (IANS) Todd Greenberg, the chief executive officer of the Australian Cricketers' Association (ACA), has claimed that David Warner's team-mates have been left very annoyed by the handling of his review into the leadership ban, and slammed Cricket Australia (CA) for losing control of the process.

On Wednesday, an angry Warner had withdrawn his application for removing lifetime leadership ban, saying that the independent review panel wanted to make it "a public lynching". Since then, CA has come under huge criticism for their handling of the issue.

"It would be a fair understatement for me to say we are unbelievably frustrated. That is the overarching emotion I felt. We are very frustrated, not just for David (Warner) and his family. But also his teammates who I know are really annoyed about this process, that it has been allowed to drag into the Test summer," said Greenberg to SEN Radio.

Greenberg explained that having a public hearing of overturning Warner's leadership ban was one of the big issues, where many had expected that it would be heard in private. "The moment Cricket Australia outsourced the review, in my view, they lost control of that process. I appreciate there are complexities in the codes of conduct and I understand there is a level of detail, but it is fact that once it was outsourced, the process was lost control."

"The code of conduct amendments that had been introduced by CA were that the review would be conducted privately unless there was very good reason for it not to be. There's nothing remarkable about that at all, it's how every code of conduct hearings has been conducted from the very beginning."

"So why the panel decided the issue needed to be a public hearing after both CA and David (Warner) agreed the matter be held privately is beyond me, and I think lacks a real level of common sense."

Greenberg pointed out that when the process of hearing the overturning leadership ban changed, Warner had no other option, but to let go of his pursuit of lifting the ban imposed on him since the Sandpaper gate in 2018.

"The code of conduct amendments were designed for the review application not to be an appeal of the original offence, it was certainly nothing like that, it was to be a forward-looking process about remorse and rehabilitation. The process became a long way removed from the one David agreed to participate in, that's why I don't think David had much choice to do what he did."

"The irony is not lost on any of us that effectively, in the end, where we got to about asking for the changes we were asking and CA agreed with us. I think there's frustration at all levels. The hard part to reconcile in all of this is Cricket Australia will agree with a lot of my comments."