The full article from the Geelong Advertiser: Author Ken Piesse reveals the explosive phone call between Steve Smith and a Cricket Australia administrator before the Cape Town ball tampering incident

Author Ken Piesse has revealed details of an explosive phone call between Steve Smith and a high level Cricket Australia administrator weeks before the Cape Town ball tampering incident.

It was the phone call in early 2018 which perhaps could have changed Australian cricket history.

Not long after the Aussies had won the first Test against South Africa in Durban in early March, then Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland was aghast.

The afterglow from a triumphant 4-0 Ashes drubbing just weeks before had been largely dimmed by striking vision of Australian cricketers, notably David Warner and Nathan Lyon, behaving badly.

After the running out of star batter AB de Villiers for a first-ball duck, it appeared Lyon had dropped the ball on the South African champion as he lay sprawled on the turf.

And Sutherland was far from impressed.Legendary sports author Ken Piesse, who spoke to dozens of cricket figures, including Sutherland, for a new biography on Warner, told the Geelong Advertiser the “so angry” chief executive put in a call to captain Steve Smith.

“(It was) totally against any spirit of the game,” Piesse said, who was in Cape Town during the infamous sandpaper controversy that would follow a few weeks later.

“That Test series was the tersest since Bodyline.

“He rang Smith that night .... and Smith said: ‘We’ve just run out the best player in the world, he, Lyon, can do what he wants’.

“Sutherland thought to himself: ‘Jesus, what have we got here? It’s the Australian captain’.

“So you’ve got the bad apple at the start, and they just let this bad behaviour continue.”It’s just one revelation to emerge from Piesse’s 66th cricket book, The Bull Daring to be Different, but just his third unauthorised tome following works on Shane Warne and Gary Ablett Senior.

The 68-year-old interviewed a number of those within Warner’s inner circle, from ongoing batting mentor Trent Woodhill, former NSW captain Dominic Thornley, icon Greg Chappell to ex-Test skipper Tim Paine.

“They just love him,” Piesse said of those who played with Warner.

“If you take away all the warts and all the bad stuff, and make him conform, he’s only half the player.”

Piesse said Warner found an exuberant ally from the summer of 2008/09 in Woodhill.“He just wanted David to keep whacking the ball,” he said.

“If you see the ball, hit the ball, and you can intimidate the bowlers ... if you can hit a six off the first ball of the match, straight back past the bowler, do it.

“So they found common ground.”

Years later, during the 2019 Ashes, Piesse understood Woodhill would become frustrated with the closed ranks approach of senior coach Justin Langer, who had encouraged Warner to bat more conservatively and protect the top to middle order in swing and seam-friendly conditions.

“It wasn’t suited to him,” Piesse said.

“Langer was running a pretty tight ship and he didn’t really let too many outsiders in.

“Whereas (new coach) Andrew McDonald, much more worldly, and sees the best in most people and things.

“Woodhill’s been able to re-establish a regular training regimen with Warner.”

Meanwhile, Piesse revealed Warner’s state career got a kickstart from his first captain in Thornley, who finally put his foot down, growing sick of chairman of selectors Brian Taber naming Warner to bat at seven in the one day team.

“Tabs, you’ve picked the team, I’m going to pick the order,” Piesse said of Thornley’s remarks to Taber.“And he immediately put Warner up to number one. And within two games Warner had teed off ... he was away.”

Warner was quickly pounding hundreds for the Blues.

Former national coach Darren Lehmann said he wouldn’t have changed anything from his tenure, believing Warner to be a “genius of a cricketer” and every team needed a player like him.

“After the death of Phil Hughes (in 2014), we were trying to play a namby-pamby game and we were getting beaten by teams that had no right to beat us, even at home,” he said of Lehmann’s view.“We had to have an edge to the game, that bristle to the game.

“So we brought it back again. But unfortunately a few of them really overstepped the mark, including Warner.”

Chappell, who wrote the forward for Piesse’s book, said Warner simply wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and would regularly upset conservative administrators, Piesse recalled.

“Chappell said that was all part of his makeup,” he said.

“He continued rubbing the right people up the wrong way.”

The book also touches on the impact Warner’s wife Candice had on the southpaw’s career; they would first connect online after Warner was banished to Zimbabwe in 2013 after punching Joe Root in a bar before the Ashes.

“Before he met Candice he was really out there, he was exuberant,” he said.

“He was so hyperactive ... people would be turned away from his exuberance.

“He really dared to be different.

“She certainly got him on the straight and narrow.”

By the time they finally met, towards the end of the 2013 Ashes, it was “love at first sight”, Piesse said: “He’s been pretty lucky to find his soulmate and it’s certainly helped his career.”

From those intimate conversations, Piesse admits he began to warm to Warner more as a person.

“Suddenly I had this insight into Warner that I certainly didn’t have before, the book is nicely balanced from that point of view,” he said.

“I think he’d be quite proud of it, because I’ve done full justice to him but without pulling any punches about the behaviour.

“It’s not a honey diversion ... not John and Betty sort of stuff.

“It’s got all the hard hitting stuff in there, but maybe not what Warner would have liked.

“The book is better for not having Warner’s direct involvement.

“Even though we know each other well.”Piesse has his own personal observations of Warner, from watching him hit a few sixes in a an innings of 30 for NSW during an under-17s competition in Frankston, then just a “little blonde kid” stationed at long off.

“He was running like Carl Lewis and throwing himself at the ball,” he said.

“His exuberance, his love for the game, was incredible.”

Then, he saw Warner sit on his own for 20 minutes during a tea break with a towel over his head, completely shattered, after being dismissed for 99 against Victoria in a Sheffield Shield game at the MCG.

“I’ve never seen a boy so disappointed to have missed what he wanted ... to prove to everybody .... that he could really play,” he said.

“I just thought: ‘Wow, this kid is going to go places’.”

However, Warner would be playing for the country at Test level by the end of the year in 2011, carrying his bat for a century against New Zealand in Hobart.

“He’s not conservative in any way, he runs to a different beat,” Piesse said.“It’s one of the reasons why, in the inner sanctum, the players love him so much.

“He is himself, and he’s not worried about anything people will say.

“He’s a little bit like Merv Hughes, a giant pest.”

Piesse is also convinced Warner became a “better bloke” after playing grassroots cricket with Eastern Suburbs amid a year-long ban for his involvement in the Cape Town controversy.

“He realised how much cricket meant to him,” he said.

“He became a better bloke, a better player, actually for having that suspension.”

However, he said rival players, like South Africa’s Faf du Plessis, would see red when Warner was in the opposing team, citing a passage during the 2012 Adelaide Test where the Aussie opener was sledging an injured Jacques Kallis for being too old.

“Du Plessis at the other end was just amazed,” he said.

“It was his 10th test and was Kallis’ 145th.“He’d think of Warrner and he’d go so much harder against Australia, because of Warner’s presence.

“He really polarised not only us, the cricket watchers, but so many opponents across the world.”

However, Piesse is not convinced Warner will tell more in his own biography about what happened in Cape Town.“I don’t think there’s anything extra from the point of view of the bowlers knowing stuff, otherwise it would have come out by now,” he said.

“I don’t think anybody else was involved.”

Ken Piesse will appear at Buckley’s Entertainment Centre on October 11 to promote The Bull Daring to be Different