Australia v India second Test: more than just a body blow for David Warner

David Warner has ample time to recover before the Indore Test but an apparently minor injury will ramify through the World Test Championship and beyond, into the Ashes.

Australia's David Warner, centre, gets medical aid during the first day of the second Test cricket match between India and Australia at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in New Delhi on Friday. Picture: Money Sharma/AFP

You’ll be familiar with those moments in the supermarket car park. You’re pulling out. A car comes close to swiping you. It’s a momentary annoyance but no more. You don’t even stop. Then, when you get home, it seems like a raptor has scraped its talons across your passenger door.

Which brings us to David Warner, yesterday incapacitated during a wonderfully hostile opening spell from Mohammad Siraj, and now invalided from the Delhi Test — a genuine oddity, but now with profound implications that not even a good panelbeater will be able to fix.

When Siraj struck Warner’s unprotected elbow in the eighth over, there were long consultations with the solicitous team doctor Leigh Golding and physiotherapist Nick Jones. Warner swigged water to wash down a painkiller; the delay was such that there was almost a case for the batter retiring. It’s worth adding, incidentally, that we still do not know that injury’s full extent.

When Warner top-edged into the underside of his jaw through the grille in the tenth over, by contrast, the contact seemed almost innocuous, at least as far as these things go. Cricinfo’s commentary described it perfunctorily (“Warner aims for the hook but looks away and cops a blow on the helmet’’) before moving on; cameras dwelt on the balcony where teammates were minimally disturbed, even smiling.

Golding emerged again, but Warner’s priority was new gloves, which he duly changed. A failure of the medical staff? A failure of the umpires? Or another illustration of concussion’s insidiousness, that even an apparently minor blow can prove consequential? For that it is, in the context of the match and of Warner’s career.

For a start, Matthew Renshaw gets a second chance, an unexpected bonus after his travails in Nagpur, and an opportunity — Marnus Labuschagne, as we know, made the most of his, never letting it go.

Warner has now scavenged 26 runs from 90 deliveries, three of which have dismissed him, from this series. Even including his brand-from-the-burning double hundred at the MCG on Boxing Day, his average since the start of 2021 is less than 30, and in India less than 22. He has ample time to recover before the Indore Test, but it will be a choice on faith rather than foundation, and will ramify for the rest of the year — through the World Test Championship and beyond, into the Ashes.

One other thing: think back now at how many innings in history would have been cut short by concussion protocols. Justin Langer’s career might have been half as long. Did we turn a blind eye too long? Now we know. That’s the other thing about those supermarket carpark encounters: you’re always more careful next time.