David Warner named T20 captain in first step to splitting up Australian captaincy duties

DAVID Warner will lead Australia in a T20 tri-series next month as Cricket Australia looks to address a trophy cabinet with one glaring omission.

David Warner. (AAP Image/Glenn Hunt) NO ARCHIVING

DAVID Warner’s appointment as Twenty20 captain is only for this coming tri-series, but it shapes as an intriguing case study for Australia looking ahead to the World Cup in 2020.

Australia has already made Mark Waugh a specialist chief selector for the shortest format and are chasing Ricky Ponting to be the T20 coach.

A squad featuring in-form, up-and-coming stars like D’Arcy Short, Alex Carey and Ben Dwarshius takes on New Zealand and England in a tri-series next month and reflects a new-age thinking that Waugh will pick the best of the best in the Big Bash League to ensure he has a nucleus of players that actually excels in Twenty20 cricket.

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Splitting up captaincy responsibilities could be a logical extension to Cricket Australia’s clear strategy to make Twenty20 cricket its high priority leading into a World Cup that will be hosted on home soil.

David Warner has long been a star in the short form of the game. Pic: AP

Australia has never won a World Twenty20 tournament since its inception more than a decade ago, and it’s a glaring omission in the trophy cabinet that up until now hasn’t been adequately addressed.

Warner doesn’t play in the Big Bash League but he is one of the most dominant figures in the IPL, the tournament in India where all T20 innovations and strategies are born.

Two years ago Warner captained Sunrisers Hyderabad to the IPL title and last year they backed up their championship with another appearance in the top four.

Ponting – the mastermind who has coached Mumbai to an IPL premiership – is on deck for Australia’s tri-series mission as assistant coach but the end goal is for CA to land him as T20 head coach once Darren Lehmann’s contract expires.

It’s felt that the head coaching role for all three formats is outdated and unmanageable given the relentless nature of the international schedule.

If that’s the case, then there must also be thought to taking some weight off Steve Smith’s shoulders.

Interestingly, Ponting has been vocal advocate in the past for Smith to relinquish the Twenty20 captaincy so that he can avoid burnout.

It’s significant that Smith has not played a single Twenty20 international for Australia since the last World Cup in India in early 2016.

Resting and injury has seen him ruled out of various T20 mini-series in the past two years, highlighting just how difficult it’s for the Test and ODI captain to play at all times.

On this occasion Smith will head to South Africa to lead Australia in a tour match in Benoni ahead of the heavy-duty four Test series against the Proteas.

Australian Test captain Steve Smith with selector Mark Waugh. Pic: AFP

Warner is the only Test player who may miss that tour match and play in the Twenty20s because Australia felt it was imperative to have a strong leader heading up the tri-series campaign.

It’s another pointer to Australia’s change in mindset with T20s.

England has split their captains and despite Joe Root’s elevation to the Test captaincy, Eoin Morgan is still the one-day and Twenty20 skipper.

It might seem unusual for the Test leader to play under someone else, but Root relishes in the chance to occasionally fly under the radar.

At the moment Australia has no intention to make a permanent change in captaincy and Smith said at the start of the summer that he hadn’t got to the point where he felt he needed to decrease his workload.

Originally published as David Warner named T20 captain in first step to splitting up Australian captaincy duties