by He goes there. Off the ground after a Test innings for the last time. Lost in the predicament of being caught lbw until more than halfway out, it seems to remember at that point why there was much more applause than would normally be an innings of 57. At pull her upright, spreading her arms to the crowd, turning a full circle as if. to take them all in a suit. It is after that, those beautiful post-fight moments on the ground where the children of the players outnumber the players, little figures rolling on the turf or cloaking themselves in streams, lit up in beams of sunlight. David Warner chats with his young daughters in between honoring each interview request, happy to keep talking: retired, but never retired.
Plenty of people will be glad to see it gone. That attitude is far more prevalent than was reflected in the media frenzy of his last Test series. Few Australian players have attracted so much attention in their own country. But a crowd relished the opportunity to applaud him for going on the field to bat, something they had four chances to do over the days and sessions of his final game. In large parts of this audience Warner has been forgiven, or at least they recognized that the time was bigger and more specific than a vague and long personal soul.
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His saga of green caps felt baggy and found a fitting way to start the week. From the beginning, Warner had a wild ability to be on the story. Even before he started the national T20 in 2009 – a wunderkind out of nowhere, a real smoke, the first since 1877 to play Australia without a first-class game to his name. If Greg Chappell’s youth policy was one of many failures, this was a great success. It would be hard to imagine another administrator having the guts to push for this kid – and two years later, with that first-class match score of 11, push that kid into the Test team.
Before Warner even made the type of knock-on-the-wall knock chosen for him, which he did by bowling 180 balls against India in Perth, he had already proven his versatility and value, carrying his bat on top of the Hobart green for 123 in his part. the second Test as the rest fell around him as New Zealand won by seven runs. He set up what should have been an Ashes win in Durham in 2013, made hundreds in two of the three live Tests in the return series, and set up a series win in South Africa with a couple of tons in Cape Town that same summer. A particular batting genius was writ large.
Throughout his life he was accompanied by a distinct lack of geniality: the verbs, the attack on the pitch, the Walkabout scuffle, flaws in character which some condemned as much as others, until he ended in Cape Town 2018. Some ‘stains’ can be worrying, although the morality of ball tampering is strange enough in a sport that has always meant it, an offense firmly in the list of behaviors other than high crimes . Those who still wince at every mention of Warner are clinging to something, having made it part of their identity in a way they are unwilling to let go of.
Far more than interference, Warner was guilty of luring an accomplished junior colleague to do the deed without the smarts or panache to hide it. And again for denying knowledge as Cameron Bancroft faces the cameras. Warner has never offered an honest public account, and his eulogies sung last week often pointed to his beauty and honesty. Concealment tends to attract more attention than offense.
But you can’t define a career as completely as one part. Not when it ends with 112 Tests played, 26 hundreds, 22 one-day tons and two World Cups won, plus the T20 equivalent and World Test Championship. The names with more international centuries make a short and illustrious roll call: Lara, Jayawardene, Amla, Kallis, Sangakkara, Ponting, Kohli, Tendulkar. Three players made more Test runs in opening: Cook, Gavaskar, G Smith. Opening in three international formats: Jayasuriya and Gayle.
Having played every IPL season since 2009 except the one when he was suspended, he is now third on the running list of those tournaments with 6,397. He has probably played more world class cricket than anyone in the world since his debut, bar perhaps Rohit Sharma and India’s Virat Kohli. No one else can fully understand the dedication required, both for physical and mental well-being, progressing in various formats while living outside the hotels and in the spotlight.
For the man who was once a boy who sensed the future, something of the old Test cricket leaves him. The pioneer of the T20 century, the IPL icon, is also the one who dedicated everything he could to the old style, barely leaving Tests with an injury, missing for no other reason than two suspensions, and rather than withdraw from the T20 circuit thereafter. second ban, returning with renewed determination to see him through his 2019 in England to score three Test scores and win the Allan Border Medal for Australia’s player of the year.
It’s easier for Australian players to make the test devotion, when the match fees amount to 20 monsters and the annual contract could even buy you a house in Sydney. But it was even more remarkable that there was nothing Warner had more to say throughout this huge career than the opportunity to play the longest and most difficult format. When a national search was launched when his baggy green was lost down the back of the sofa shows again how important this cricket, specifically, was. He continued to make that clear in his exit interviews.
“We have the pinnacle of Australian cricket aspiring to have this baggy green,” he said in one. “I just want to give a little advice to the young people out there. Keep your dreams, keep believing. This is the ultimate in cricket: Test match cricket. This is what you want to be playing for and trying to achieve.”
This was Warner with an eye for big things, the same way he played as one of the country’s most high-profile players, as a union shop steward in the 2017 industrial dispute, standing up for women players and players a home that Cricket Australia wanted. cut out of revenue sharing market. It was one of his most admirable moments, something his detractors are unlikely to remember or acknowledge.
Finally, facts will not matter when people are basing their opinions on jokes or stories. Those close to Warner or those who encountered his good side will remember his good humor and generosity. Those who did not remember the madness and talent with grudges. The thing is, you’re allowed to take all that into account – all the reasons for criticism, all the counter-claims – and still enjoy what Warner the cricketer and Warner the personality offered to those who were watching them.
There were his troubling streaks, in a more wholesome form: a great ability to wound people, to exasperate opponents, to imitate honesty, to spout false stories at press conferences, as if to confirm that he was getting of one-day cricket in the same breath. insisting that he will play Champions Trophy 2025. There is much to be read from Usman Khawaja’s comment that his mother’s childhood nickname for Warner is “devil” in Urdu.
Above all, he was the entertainer on the pitch, as he was: the man who two months ago was doing a back-and-forth circus while scooping a ball into the rafters of the Chinnaswamy Stadium during a World Cup match, the bombshell opener, who knocked out a kid on the second row of the Waca before being consoled with a pair of batting gloves, who smoked a hundred before lunch to start a Test match and became only the fifth person ever to do it, the switch-winner, the occasional right-hander, the kamikaze streak between the wickets or the outfield, the player who went back to England in 2023 despite public interest in the limited over in his failure and instead helped establishing two Australian Ashes sealing victories.
The sum is a complete image of chaos, of clashing colors and strange figures, part Jackson Pollock, part Bayeux Tapestry, part LED drone show, and even if the effect on the whole gives you a migraine, there is no denying that. there was art in its construction. Nor is the fact that his creation, a few marginal panels aside, is coming to an end. At the center still character all in white, and absolutely no claim to the angelic. For anyone who followed cricket, it was part of our lives for 15 years. That means something, as does the assumption that complexity exists, and binary only works for computers. Some people find it easy to hate Warner, and they’ll tell you that, but for the rest of us, that was impossible. Thank you Dave. It was fun.
