David Warner's Drive By Shooting

The last thing this debate needed

He was never going to go quietly. As much as he has bitched and moaned about always being front and centre in every story about Australian cricket, he appears to be missing it already.

And truth be told, maybe some are missing him too. After all, it was a lot easier picking a side when you could put his name straight in at the top of the order.

A lot easier getting a story over the line with an editor when his name is in it.

Remember David Warner?

Even if you wanted to forget him he was never going to let that happen. His smirking face was always going to show up at your window.

You will have noted by now that Ben Horne has run with Warner’s offer to open for Australia if they really need him. Horne knows a good story when he sees one. I just cannot take this seriously, but there’s no avoiding it because the news is everywhere. This is one straight from the Shane Warne playbook. For years after he retired the King would offer something similar. As late as 2012 he was throwing the hat into the ring.

“If your best friend says ‘mate, I want you to seriously consider making a commitment to Australian cricket and coming back out of retirment, make myself available for selection, that’s a different scenario,” he said back then.

His best friend, Michael Clarke, clearly did not make the call.

Maybe we’ve been in similar territory this week with Steve Smith saying he will do whatever the team needs - especially if it means going back to No.4.

But what the team does not need right now is David Warner back in the Test side. That is a step in the wrong direction. That is allowing yourself think time that can only result in a worse headache than the one gripping the collective cricket brain.

Thank you David, but it is time to move on. It will be better for you and better for Australia.

Warner’s farewell tour at times resembled The Bugler Who Wouldn’t Die episode at the top of the Peter Seller’s movie The Party - and there’s a film whose lack of political correctness must have assigned it to the ‘you wouldn’t get away with that these days’ bin at the back of the last remaining Video Ezy.

His retirement went forever. I dubbed the Sydney Test “Warner Week” and what a week it was, kickiing off with the truly bizarre story about his missing/not-missing cap - a story that even had the PM on the case but one that a few people were raising a cocked eyebrow to from the get go.

He wasn’t making it up, but there was always a feeling that something wasn’t quite right and so it proved when the item turned up in his bag in the hotel’s storage locker - just not the bag he thought it was in.

The mind went back to the time Shane Warne burnt his hand in a ‘cooking related incident’ ahead of the BBL season (trying to fry bacon). Gideon was in fits of laughter at the number of calls I got that day from news desks, editors, friends, radio and the like who wanted to know about the injury. You feel your soul leaving your body at times like this.

Warne and Warner know how to draw focus and obsess the public. Both are human headlines, both god’s gift to a slow news day, both generate interest above and beyond anyone else in their eras.

We’re living in their world whether we like it or not.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I like Dave, he is a shit-stirrer and a bit of a rat bag who doesn’t mind winding people up. Larrikinism is hard to pull off these days but he has made a pretty good fist of it.

That said, on reflection I am a little concerned that in retirement we are going to get even more of him than we have in the past few years. He is moving into the commentary box for the first couple of Tests for Fox Cricket and he is untethered from Cricket Australia’s contractual control.

While you might think he’s been front and centre of everything, everywhere for all of time, he has to some degree kept his own counsel since the South Africa ban.

Stand by because now he’s got a microphone not a cricket bat in his hand.

Getting back, however, to this “deadly serious” offer to open the batting. Crash Craddock makes an interesting point out about it in a comment piece to accompany Ben Horne’s exclusive story.

“If we are to be brutally honest, it may well be that a footloose and free Warner would have been a better chance of scoring runs against India in Perth than the constipated, nerve-wracked, sweaty-palmed souls striving to fill his shoes.”

Warner has a sense of this. He must be quietly loving the fact that they’re finding it so hard to replace him.

The Steve Smith experiment appears to be over, although not before Smith went on record to counter claims by selector George Bailey that he had asked to move back down the order.

Two rounds of the Sheffield Shield have passed without anyone insisting that they are the right person for the job. Australia’s Plan B in recent years - Harris, Bancroft, Renshaw - have not compelled the selectors to make a choice yet.

And then there’s Kid Konstas who arrived into the 2024-25 season with a bang. He batted well in the second innings of the most recent round but didn’t do enough to end the debate.

With nobody landing the knock out punch we move on to a third round of the Shield and an Australia A game that features Konstas, Harris, Renshaw and the smokey Nathan McSweeney whose scores of 55, 127no, 37 and 46 batting at first drop in the Shield have helped push his name into discussions. Pete Handscomb’s another. Hunt another still. Maddinson is not the maddest of ideas.

At the moment it’s like being in a restaurant with a menu where no item stands out, but if the waiter was standing over my shoulder right now I’d put my finger down the list and try the Konstas.

Fortunately for us the kitchen is not closing just yet.

A caller on SEN this morning urged the selectors to be “brave” and to go with the kid and it was not hard to be swayed by the argument. Who doesn’t want to be brave? Who doesn’t want to see a teenager make their debut?

It’s an easy job when you aren’t the one taking responsibility but even the most black and white among us will have some sympathy for the difficult task selectors have before them.

David Warner is supposed to be catching up with his old mate John Howard for dinner sometime this week. The Warners and the Howards are close, a relationship revealed on the front page of The Australian sometime last summer.

It’s extraordinary how the Liberal Party go to Mr H everytime they have a high profile candidate in trouble during a campaign, but one thing they have not done is try to get him back into parliament. And if they did I’m sure he would have been sensible enough to say no.