It’s impossible to say how history will remember David Warner, but certain that he won’t soon be forgotten. Let’s just say that he is bound one day to be admitted to the Australian cricket hall of fame, but it won’t be at the first opportunity. A statute of limitations applies.
Warner has been a prodigious run-maker for a long time, and for a long time was a prodigal character, buying public goodwill with his spectacular batsmanship and spending it on antagonism and surliness.
David Warner celebrates a century.Credit:Getty Images
It was presumed that these properties were indivisible in him. He went hard at the ball and hard at the opposition. It made for him enemies abroad and fewer friends at home than a man with his record and impact ought to have. He has been no Scotty Boland.
And then one day in South Africa in 2018, he went way too far, and it rebounded on him in the ugliest way. Some fans will never forgive him and that is understandable. Fans need to be able to believe their eyes and Warner had tried to pull the wool over theirs. He traduced their game. He will be detained for many years at their pleasure.
Warner was from the start original. He played and dominated limited overs cricket for Australia before he had played a first-class match for NSW, and it both singled him out and typecast him.
David Warner with the ball in Cape Town in 2018 as the ball-tampering storm is about to explode.Credit:Getty Images
He vowed to change that. I remember him outside a lift in a hotel in Johannesburg in 2011 saying that Cricket Australia wanted him to be the poster boy for Twenty20, but he was having none of that. He wanted to play Test cricket and would show them, and so he comprehensively did, mastering all three forms. That took strength of mind and method.
He made vast numbers of runs quickly. Comparing apples with apples, he’s got a better average than Justin Langer and a better strike rate than Matthew Hayden, better than all except Adam Gilchrist, who unlike Warner had his wicketkeeping as his get-out-of-jail-free card.
He’s befriended the new ball. He made a century from 69 balls one day, a century before lunch on day one in another Test, a unique feat in Australia. In just his fourth innings, he carried his bat, a rare thing. He made two centuries in a match three times and a triple century, too. He was no less prolific in short form cricket, for various clubs and country. The most momentous development in cricket in his time is the Indian Premier League, and he was a trailblazer there.
If there is a flaw in his record, it is in Tests away from Australia. He’s not alone there. The counterpoint is that he once made twin tons in, of all places, Cape Town. They were mighty and match- and series-winning.
But just as he was pigeonholed as a batsman, so he was marked out as a belligerent, schemer and agent provocateur. This proved harder to shed – because he didn’t try, because he didn’t want to and because it suited the Australian dispensation of the time anyway. Ergo, Cape Town.
Warner took his licks, bit his tongue, played club cricket and came back a year later as a reformed character in a reformed age. A wretched Ashes tour in 2019 must have tried his sangfroid, but when I mumbled words of commiserations outside another lift in Manchester, he replied that he was just fine because Australia were going to retain the Ashes the next day. And they did.
David Warner has been prolific in one-day cricket, too.Credit:AP
Warner occupies a singular place in Australia’s cricket consciousness. He’s not a sloth, a drunk or a philanderer. He’s devoted to his wife and family; in another, this would be cherished. Though the runs are thinning out now, he’s made a plenitude.
But fans react viscerally, warming to some players more than others. To many of them, he will always be a cheat. Public affection is not subject to parole. Warner aborted his campaign to have his lifetime captaincy ban rescinded. Because he’s Warner, that’s been received as tacit recalcitrance.
I believe that redemption must be available to all, but I know good people who’ve closed the book on Warner. History’s lens generally is kind, but it might never have had to train on someone at once as simple and complicated as Warner.
His immediate challenge is the Boxing Day Test, his 100th. It’s become his hardest century. Whether or not it is his last, the reckoning will have to wait. He has Cricket Australia’s reassurance that his blotted copybook will not stand in the way of further roles in the game. If he has truly learned, he has much to teach.
Still, as the finish line looms, he must feel like the villager in that rude old joke who has filled his life with good works, but because of one long ago indiscretion with a goat is stuck forever with an unfortunate nickname.
In Warner’s case, it is an elephant, and it is still in the room.
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