Warner back on bus after keeping shape

Dave Warner was forced to hold his breath longer than Steve Smith but exhaled with relief at Headingley.

David Warner on the front foot in Headingley. Picture: Getty Images.

A mindless, but mildly disturbing group gathered at the window as David Warner spoke to a small, cramped room full of journalists. A line of security kept them from stepping into the small garden bordering the Kirkstall Lane perimeter.

“Cheat,” they yelled, their fingers pointing and their faces twisting as if they were relatives of the victim. The cameras rolled inside and the Australian smiled, letting the ugliness pass like the balls that swung and seamed past his bat in the heavy Headingley air.

“Going out to sign autographs?” someone asked.

“I’d probably have my nose broken,” he said, still smiling, still playing inside the line of the ­delivery.

David Warner is back and ­relieved to be so, almost as ­relieved as the side that found ­itself, with Steve Smith absent.

Warner is the leader Australia rejected. Smith, arguably, fell from the greatest height in the wake of Cape Town. Warner, undoubtedly, suffered the greatest punishment. Cameron Bancroft, almost appropriately, is the first to come and go again since.

Warner’s lifetime leadership ban was the harshest of all verdicts handed down by the administrators of the Cricket Australia brand. For a moment there last week he had looked almost as dejected again as he had in its wake.

Sitting on the balcony at Lord’s on Sunday, after failing to score significantly for the fourth time in the series, he was as unhappy as you will ever see him when the cause is simple cricket.

Stream the 2019 India Tour of West Indies on KAYO SPORTS. Every T20I, ODI and Test Live & On-Demand on your TV, computer, mobile or tablet. Get your 14-day free trial >

“I was just frustrated. When you do get out in those circumstances, you are going out there to chase 268, it’s quite a long distance away you have to have that mindset of still looking to score,” he said, his mind working in quick singles. “The way I got out was a bit lazy in that second dig, it just happens, that’s the game, that’s why we love it.”

He didn’t look like he was ­loving it at the time, but his passion for his profession was back at Headingley. He was chirpy after the game and even a little chirpier in it. You can never be exactly certain of what you hear from a distance, but when one of England’s fielders had a crack at him Warner appeared to say “21 centuries, mate”. It was as much a personal affirmation as retort.

When Stuart Broad loomed over the new chum, Marnus ­Labuschagne, at Leeds, Warner inserted himself into the fracas. The senior student calling off the bully. He and Broady have an easygoing rivalry.

When they blow the dust off the digital scorecards from this match Warner’s half century, like Labuschagne’s, will look remarkable only because nobody else passed 11. And when you have the aforementioned number of centuries, 30-odd halves and 6000-odd Test runs, a 61 doesn’t really poke above the skyline.

Make no mistake, however, it was some innings in the context of the game it was played, but even more so in the context of Warner’s career. Smith resurfaced in the first Test with a pair of 140s, Warner was forced to hold his breath longer.

Sure he’d come back to the IPL and re-established himself in the upper rungs of its batting hierarchy, he’d done similar in the World Cup and that’s an achievement that shouldn’t be ignored, but this was Test cricket. The top of the tree. The game they said he would never play when they first saw him wandering out to the middle of the MCG in Australian colours with no first-class cricket to his name.

There was a concern that maybe he’d exhausted all his emotional and physical energy to get to the start of their Ashes and that he had none left to fight when the game turned on him. In three of the four innings he’d got good deliveries. As you get longer in the tooth it gets harder to fight back. The game can do that to you when it sets its mind to it, but if you are lucky and alert to that luck it will extend another chance.

Warner played and missed more times on the first day at Headingley than was conceivable, but he did not make the mistake of chasing the ball on all but one occasion. He kept his shape, as they say, playing the line of the ball and not chasing it as it moved away from him.

He’d spent the previous day with Ricky Ponting and the former captain understood the innings in terms of its immediate team context.

He might have lost his driver’s licence and be banned from the front seat, but Warner is the sort of person critical to a team bus reaching its destination.