Cheating.

Say it, David.

“I cheated.”

Yesterday we ran through how David Warner’s bank balance was haemorrhaging money, but we had yet to hear from the crook himself.

That changed this morning at 6:39AM local time, when Warner sent out this statement via his Twitter account:

Mistakes. My part in it. How come no one wants to say the word “cheated”?

Mate, you took a younger player aside, whose career you have now forever tarnished, and literally taught him how to cheat. This was in the story we posted yesterday, but I’ll pop it here again:

The governing body’s investigation established that Warner had not only told Bancroft to take the sandpaper onto the ground, but had gone as far as giving Bancroft a tutorial on how to tamper with the ball.

Warner was found to have been behind the “development” of the plan and was alleged to have given “instruction to a junior player to carry out a plan to take steps to attempt to artificially alter the condition of the ball using sandpaper”.

Further, and most damningly, it was concluded that he provided “advice to a junior player regarding how a ball could be artificially altered including demonstrating how it could be done.”

Warner has been banned from ever captaining Australia, and I would be surprised if they ever allow him to play for the national team again.

If he does, maybe we can finally leave the Sonny Bill chirps alone (they make us look really, really shitty) and just stick to calling him a cheat.

Look, I can understand those who feel some sympathy for Steve Smith. In case you missed it, here are the scenes when he left OR Tambo heading back to Australia:

Steve Smith will come back from his ban having learnt his lesson, and you can bet he’ll pull his socks up.

Warner, on the other hand, is a serial offender who has time and time again shown his lack of respect for the game he claims to love. There’s an old saying about polishing a turd, but let’s stick to the one about a leopard never changing its spots.

You know this story is big when CNN spend a great part of their day covering it, and I guess some non-cricket fans won’t understand why Australians, and the rest of the world’s cricket fans, are so up in arms.

This piece on the Sydney Morning Herald, titled “Why all of Australia must own the ball-tampering scandal”, might help:

The real bad news is, I reckon you and I are a part of it.

For years, we have tacitly accepted the ever-deteriorating behaviour of our cricketers, the lowering of standards, their pursuit of victory, whatever the cost. We didn’t want to talk about the tedious gamesmanship, we didn’t raise hell when the sledging turned personal, we didn’t shout to our cricketers to pull their bloody heads in and behave like adults, we were happy to compare Steve Smith to Bradman’s batting average without ever insisting that he also measure up to the comportment of The Don’s era.

No, all we cared about was the results. Beat the Windies? Great! Won the Ashes? That is all that counts.

We never looked too closely at the methods used, perhaps for fear of what we’d find, and never protested loudly enough when ugliness did appear. We – and I particularly mean we in the media – always gave our blokes the benefit of the doubt and gave the cricketers to understand that anything could be all but instantly forgiven as long as they kept winning…

Somehow, as a nation, we wandered away from the whole idea of what sport was meant to be about in the first place – fun, friendly competition, a test of skill, character, and will to win.

And now, we have seen the result. You and me, babe. We also own this mess.

It’s not that they tried to change the condition of the ball – it’s that Warner and co. dragged the integrity of their countrymen down the toilet, all the while preaching from their pedestals.

David, a half-arsed apology where you talk about “mistakes” and your part in it doesn’t cut it for me, and I imagine many Ozzies feel the same way.

[source:smh]