How long before David Warner’s time in the Test side is up?

David Warner might not be considered the best opener in Australia for much longer. Picture: AFP

Over dinner at Adelaide Oval on Saturday, with Australia having forged a huge lead, Fox Sports sought to enliven proceedings by padding up their star guest commentator Brian Lara for a recreational hit in the nets. Practise is where you get some of the best entertainment of a Test anyway, and a big name reliably draws a crowd.

Lara is 53. He last took a Test field in November 2006. His hair is slightly grizzled; there is a tremble of tummy at the waistband. But when he lays back and cuts, or whips through mid-wicket, the flourish of his backlift and the speed of his downswing are unmistakeable. Is it really seventeen years since he made 226 from 298 balls with 22 fours on this ground?

Rashid Khan, the world’s number one white ball bowler, was his opponent, and there were assuredly no gimmees. But Lara was not to be contained, dancing down a final time, and scything to leg. Why, one wondered, was he not still out there? Why had he given up in the first place. What is it that goes missing when a great player feels their finitude? Not, evidently, the skills. The ambition? The appetite? The aura? The capacity for recovering from setbacks?

One day, perhaps, Warner will partake of curtain calls like this. He’ll be invited out to do his stuff, and we’ll recall him in his punchy panache. But not quite yet: he continues putting himself to the test, searching for runs, looking for breaks, drawing attention. He has been hard to miss in the field in this Test for his distinctive millinery, bowler’s baggy perched atop a sun hat to create a two-tone topper.

Still, something indefinable is lacking. Standing at slip, he should have caught Roston Chase off Cameron Green and ended West Indies’ first innings at 184, but the ball forced it way through his hands and the last pair added 43 in 77 balls.

When Australia commenced its second innings, Warner’s outside edge to his first ball from Jason Holder bisected Chase and Shamarh Brooks, loitering too deep at slip. His third ball lodged awkwardly in a pad flap. When Warner was 5, he survived an lbw review from Alzarri Joseph; soon after he edged Anderson Phillip sketchily to third man.

To be fair, Warner’s wicket was never threatened outright, but nor did he threaten to break away against this third-rate knock-off of the Caribbean attacks of yore. After 12 overs, Usman Khawaja had outscored him 41 to 20 while taking no special risks – a ratio once unthinkable.

After drinks, Warner sank to his padded knees, alarming those suspicious of a neo-Marxist fifth column in Australian ranks: in fact he was rubbing his palms in the crease’s grit, presumably for enhanced grip, but it might almost have been a plea for form and fluency.

The cricket gods blinked. To his first ball from Chase, who had previously taken one wicket for 288 off 67 overs on this tour, Warner played a strangely ambivalent shot, neither attacking nor defending, neither bold nor secure, and dragged on for 28: his Test average since that blockbuster 2019-20 when he carried all before him.

For all that he has been a contributor in other ways – player of the 2021 T20 World Cup, for example – he last made a Test century when coronavirus sounded like something caught from cigars.

In and around Warner’s individual struggles, there were shafts of brilliance. The best came first, in the opening over from Mitchell Starc, an athlete among fast bowlers, with a stride that eats the ground and a spring like his high jumping brother Brandon.

Australia’s concentration of forces for Tagenarine Chanderpaul’s mishook had left the off side invitingly untenanted, and in pushing into toward the covers the batter took an exploratory canter down the pitch.

That was sufficient. From the end of his follow through round the wicket, Starc detoured right, ran round the back of the ball to collect on his left, and with a side-arm throw blew a stump from the ground; Chanderpaul, having come a step too far, dived despairingly. It recalled the run out of Ian Bell with which Starc finished the 2013 Ashes.

Episodic resistance from the West Indies tail narrowed the deficit to 297, and Australia rather dawdled in their second innings, with bowlers’ rest rather than batters’ runs the objective. They left themselves twenty-four overs by declaring for the fourth time in this worseningly one-sided series.

If players can unravel slowly, teams can expire quickly, and there was little stuffing left in the West Indies for the Australians to knock out, but they did it anyway. In his first over of the second innings, Scott Boland struck not once, not twice, but thrice, drawing hesitant edges from Kraigg Brathwaite and Jermaine Blackwood, and pinning Brooks to the crease with such a portentous thud that a review would have been downright masochistic.

A day that had dawned hopefully for Chanderpaul then set with a leg side strangle off Starc. You left wondering whether Brian Lara wasn’t still the best batter in the West Indies, and also how long David Warner could be considered the best opener in Australia.