'What’s wrong with scratching the ball' - Allan Border urges CA to lift leadership ban on David Warner

David Warner has been playing some of his best cricket at the moment, and his form and temperament have engendered a unanimous voice in Australia calling for the upliftment of the captaincy ban on the southpaw. Former Aussie captain Allan Border is the latest cricketing figure to throw his weight behind the matter as he urged Cricket Australia to lift the ban as soon as possible.

Warner, along with Steven Smith and Cameron Bancroft, were banned from playing international and domestic cricket for up to one year in the aftermath of the sandpaper scandal in the Cape Town Test in 2018 against South Africa. The Australian board were quite severe with their indictment of Smith and Warner as the former was banned from taking leadership roles for two years, whilst the latter was handed a lifetime ban from captaincy.

Meanwhile, former Australian skipper Allan Border becomes the latest name to back the 35-year-old and has batted for uplifting the lifetime ban on his captaincy duties. Earlier, Pat Cummins, the red-ball skipper for the Kangaroos, had also voiced his opinion on the matter and had urged the CA to contemplate their verdict. In what can be called a controversial statement, Border accused other teams of doing the same and said that the players have already served their punishments and should not be liable anymore.

“It was a harsh penalty in the first place… let’s get on with it; they’ve served their time. I know that every other side’s doing exactly what we were caught doing. (If) all the captains put their hands on their hearts and say, ‘I wasn’t doing anything similar, they’d be telling ‘porky pies’ (lies). The bans those boys copped were a bit over the top for the crime, given the knowledge around the cricket fraternity where this has been going on,” Border told The West Australian on Monday.

Scratching the ball gets the ball to reverse swing: Allan Border

The 66-year-old, who led a young, unheralded Australian team to World Cup glory in 1987, stated that there is nothing wrong in scratching the ball with the hand. He believes that natural ball tempering should be permitted in cricket as it helps the bowlers induce reverse swing from the ball and level the playing field in tough bowling conditions on batting-friendly decks.

“If you get the ball in your hand… just scratching the ball and working on it over a period of time, and you get the ball reverse swinging… what’s wrong with that? It’s not a bad idea because, on flat wickets, you need something. Otherwise, the scores are just going to blow out, and that’s what happens now when we start preparing result wickets because it’s very hard to get good players out on very flat tracks,” Border added.