Opening act ready to prove game wrong one more time

All I want for Christmas is a David Warner hundred. What a message of peace and goodwill that would be for one of Australian cricket’s most controversial and consistent characters.

David Warner in full flow. Picture: AFP.

All I want for Christmas is a David Warner hundred. What a message of peace and goodwill that would be for one of Australian cricket’s most controversial and consistent characters.

All I want is to see The Bull doing what the The Bull has always done.

Crouched and coiled, low at the crease, Mike Tyson with a bat, ready to unleash those fearsome jabs, uppercuts and roundhouse punches that leave an opposition bowling attack a little unsteady on its feet while the last echoes of the anthem still hang in the air.

Peeling the tape on his boxing gloves open, then sealing them shut between every ball.

Kinda fitting that he’s at the MCG, the place where he hinted at his brutal talents in a T20 match, a punk from the wrong side of the tracks, picked for Australia before he was picked for NSW’s well-stocked Sheffield Shield side, Warner had climbed over the back fence and found his way to the middle.

One hundred Tests later, the batsman they all thought would be cricket’s first T20 mercenary with scant regard for the game’s traditions has proved to be the player who held sacred the tradition and set the standard for how to combine the past and the fast-evolving present.

Come Melbourne, Warner will have 100 Tests, 141 ODIs and 99 T20s. When the T20 odometer rolls over, he will join Ross Taylor and Virat Kohli as the only players to have played 100 games in all three formats. It takes a certain type of magician to keep all three balls in the air, but as good as his short-format career has been, the focus now is on the longest and greatest of them.

When you close your eyes and play highlights reels of David Warner’s Test career, what do you see? For me, it will always be that time he roused himself from his grief and launched into an Indian attack in the first overs of the 2014 series.

Operating as if by animal instinct, he broke through the fog that had surrounded cricket in the days previous when they farewelled Phillip Hughes in Macksville. Warner set up a series win in the first hour of the game. Set the opposition attack on its back foot as he so often did.

Across 99 Tests, Warner scores at a strike rate of 71 runs a hundred balls. That puts him in rare company. Fellow opener Virender Sehwag scored 82 runs a hundred, while middle-order bats Adam Gilchrist (82) and Shahid Afridi (87) also go better.

Warner has the acceleration of an electric car.

Ricky Ponting knew how to move a game on from the first-drop position and had some pretty swift openers to follow in his time, but only registers a strike rate close to 59. Steve Waugh (49), Michael Clarke (56) and Matthew Hayden (60) are similarly left at the lights.

The value of an opener who averages in the high 40s and gets them at such a rate is enormous; such a talent puts the side ahead of the game and relieves pressure from the batsmen that follow.

Sehwag took him aside at the first IPL, long before anyone believed he would be a Test cricketer – or believed him when he said he wanted to be one – and told him he had the tools for the job.

“When I went to Delhi, Sehwag watched me a couple of times and said to me ‘you’ll be a better Test cricketer than what you will be a T20 player’, Warner recalled.

“I basically looked at him and said ‘mate, I haven’t even played a first-class game yet’. But he said ‘all the fielders are around the bat, if the ball is there in your zone, you’re still going to hit it. You’re going to have ample opportunity to score runs. You’ve always got to respect the good ball, but you’ve always got to punish the ball, you always punish’.”

Warner had, actually, played one Sheffield Shield match by then. Finally given a chance at No.6, he’d scored a solid 42 and got to bat with his childhood friend, Usman Khawaja, who posted 172 not out.

He batted in the middle order in three Shield games the next summer, but was moved up to open in the 2010-11 season.

Immediately he fared better, scoring 99 first up against Victoria and then 114 in the next against Western Australia.

Warner always had an implacable self-belief.

He was called over as cover for an injured batsman when the Australians played a two-Test series against South Africa in November 2011 but sent home before the match began. I recall him dragging his coffins across the foyer of the Johannesburg hotel after checking out and pausing when I said goodbye.

“Next time you see me, I will be opening for Australia,” he said. It was a pretty big call, given Shane Watson and Hughes were the incumbents, but he was right and it didn’t take long for his class to shine.

Amid a catastrophic collapse in Hobart, he carried his bat, scoring 123 not out, against New Zealand when the next best con-tribution was Khawaja’s 23.

With that 12-month sojourn aside, he has been a constant at the top of the order as Hughes, Shane Watson, Ed Cowan, Chris Rogers, Joe Burns, Matthew Renshaw, Shaun Marsh, Cam Bancroft, Khawaja, Will Pucovski and Marcus Harris rotated through.

A few Tests later, India was bowled out on the first day in Perth and Warner was unbeaten on 104 at stumps from 84 deliveries, having hit 13 fours and three sixes. On his return to South Africa in 2014, he scored 135, 145 and 133 in consecutive innings, compiling 504 at an average of 90.5 in the three-Test series.

Then there was the 163, 116 and 253 sequence against New Zealand in 2015, the 154 and 335 not out against Pakistan in 2019.

Warner never looked fallible and never suffered from self-doubt. He looks the former at the moment, but he sounds the latter ahead of his 100th Test.

Can he prove the game wrong one more time?