Is the fight in David Warner fading?

The Bull is wounded, but is he beaten? His elbow cracked and swollen, his pride is hurt but he will not go easily.

David Warner gestures during the second Test in Dehi. Picture: AFP.

The Bull is wounded, but is he beaten? His elbow cracked and swollen, his pride is hurt, he’s out of the Test team and the army of critics who have questioned his credentials for over a decade are demanding his Test career be brought to an end.

But he will not go easily. He’s not done yet. He went for a run on the second day when he was substituted from the match.

When the game was done he took his wife and three daughters to see the sights of Delhi and became accustomed to the idea that he was, for the moment, unable to continue. Then he and his four girls boarded a flight home.

Test great Matthew Hayden is watching this Border-Gavaskar Trophy from the commentary box and the parallels between the pair are compelling and obvious.

Both openers played 103 Tests at the top of the order for their country.

Their 8000-run contribution to the cause is greater than any, including former captain Mark Taylor and ex-coach Justin Langer. Both notched a top score in excess of 300.

Both had a similar presence at the crease. Both took a long time to convince cricket they were Test-calibre batsmen.

Both were players loved by their own but not necessarily by their opposition.

Haydos ruffled feathers in a clash with the establishment.

At one stage he was chested by Glenn McGrath in a limited-overs match while playing for Australia A against the first XI – at least Warner’s heated moments were reserved for the opposition.

I recall when it all started to come undone for Hayden in the summer of 2008-09.

Sometime around then we’d gone out to the suburbs of Melbourne on a mission for a charity he was involved with. Both our daughters in tow. I recall him putting his baggy green on the head of a spare-toothed woman in a commission estate and asking her to dance on the threadbare carpet.

She cackled with delight.

I remember, as the vultures circled and the pressure grew, then him telling me in a corner outside the dressing room that he was going to “bat on” before the Boxing Day Test.

He left the Sydney Test a fortnight later with the bit between his teeth. Chased by cameras as he packed the car with his wife Kellie he was determined to continue, but something changed when he got back home with his family.

Ever the competitor, the then 37-year-old had a moment of enlightenment in the garden and he called a press conference.

As the youngest of his three boys climbed on to his lap, he battled his emotions and explained.

“On Saturday I was picking a crazy bush of wild tomatoes and talking with Grace (his daughter), as dad and daughter do, I said ‘darling, I think I’ve had enough. I want to be here’,” he said.

“‘Oh, daddy, one more Christmas’. She loved the Boxing Day Test. I said: ‘No, darling this is the time’.”

He was always the most human of cricketers and life was calling him away from the game.

Will that happen to Warner?

Maybe. But he gave no indication of it as he left India. He was, as Hayden had been all those summers before, determined to bat on.

The big Queenslander talked about his last summer and Warner’s situation in the days after the opener broke his elbow.

“When Steve Waugh retired as players, especially Justin and I, we were saying ‘he just got a hundred, why would you want to retire?’,” Hayden said.

“We couldn’t understand it.”

Some years behind Waugh in the cricket-life cycle, the pair could not see that short distance into the future.

“With every great player, and David is one of those, it always comes as a bit of a surprise because you are that person in the dressing room who carries the street and the fight,” Hayden explained.

“Stephen said something very profound, as he often did in his limited amount of words, and that was ‘when you are thinking about retirement you are already retired’. In my heart going into that summer, knowing the fishbowl of the Australian sporting community during the summer of cricket you just get that feeling that the fight is with everything and everyone else except that cricket ball.

“That causes glimpses of genius because your instincts to survive are strong, but there are moments when you drift into a space that gives the opposition the chance to get you out.

“I feel that is where Davey has been at for some time and I know that’s where you are as an athlete.”

Maybe people only have so many fights in them. Hayden sees a parallel between Warner’s role as the spokesman for the playing group during the contract dispute – a stance many believe steeled the board’s heart against him and ensured he endured extra punishment over the sandpaper affair – and his own battles with the suits.

“For me, I see a lot of similarities with Davey, almost anti-Establishment. I took the path of being the ACA person like he did in the players’ dispute and before that with the Cricket Academy,” Hayden said.

“That was another weight.

“He was a great street fighter, he can commit to anything but the question is does he want to do that? He’s not finished yet, he’ll find that happy place.”

Cameron Bancroft scored his fourth Shield hundred of the season this week and is shaping as a replacement for Warner in the short term, but the churn that occurred after Langer and Hayden retired is a warning to Australian cricket.

Warner remains the only consistent opener identified since their exit and has danced with a dozen or so partners in the time he has filled that role.

Hayden sounds a warning to those calling time on Warner’s career.

“I’ll tell you this as well, we are not going to find a better replacement for him as yet. It’s all fine to drop a legend, or a legend to retire because they’re feeling immense pressure, which is often their own pressure, but who is the person to replace him.

“He’s had how many partners now? It is an extraordinary number. I was lucky enough to have my best mate (Langer) at the other end for the majority of my career in Test cricket.”