David Warner can now be coach of Australia, NSW or another state, or any Big Bash League franchise. He can be chair or a director of Cricket Australia. If things really fall apart for the national team, he can even be Test captain. He won’t, but he can.

So ends a strange subplot to the 2018 Cape Town cheating scandal, of which Warner has admitted to being the instigator. Before fronting the CA review panel last week, he accepted the statement, “I admit the offence that I have been charged with and accept the imposition of the proposed sanction(s).”

Unlike the other known participants, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft, Warner was singled out for a leadership ban. But the ban had no time limit. He could have that ban lifted in “exceptional circumstances”, according to Cricket Australia’s rules, but there was no definition of those circumstances.

He had made a stab at having the ban lifted in 2022 but withdrew when it seemed he was going to have to relitigate the original case. Now - with Cricket Australia supporting his application - he has had the ban lifted.

It was always peculiar that the player who was neither captain of the Australian team in Cape Town in 2018 nor the one who took sandpaper onto the field was the one who received the heaviest sanction.

Warner was perceived as the “mastermind” of the scheme in part because of the stigma he had earned throughout his career: the open sledging, the bar-room punch he laid on Joe Root in Birmingham in 2013, a collection........

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