Warner and Peace

There’s a few things worth saying about Warner's goodbye to all that starting Wednesday

Gideon Haigh

It’s Warner Week.  Most Test matches are preluded by at least a few days’ speculation - about conditions, team compositions, potential milestones.  But since David Warner soft launched his Test farewell on Thursday with a parting wave to the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, there’s been no escaping what’s been almost the summer’s overriding story.

Illustration by Fisher Classics www.fisherclassics.com

There’s a few things worth saying about Warner's goodbye to all that starting Wednesday.  Firstly, farewells are good business.  They afford rare pauses in the relentless route march of the cricket schedule - the opportunity to step out of the present, revisit the past, ponder the future.  The media craves stationary targets.  They allow planning, commissioning ahead of time, the preparation of obsequies, the foregathering of cliches.  And what a ‘love-him-or-hate-him-you-can’t-ignore-him’ subject is Australia’s veteran opener, always a little grudgingly admired, regularly eristic, stubbornly indestructible.

Secondly, like everything else, farewells are not what they were.  This is merely Warner’s peeling away from one format.  Apparently he’s already eyeing the next ODI World Cup, during which he would turn forty-one.  Competition impends for his services between the Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash League and the Dubai Capitals in the ILT20, while there are further white ball internationals in the offing before the Indian Premier League.  Warner has accomplished something like that classic line about Scott Morrison - that he had the capacity to enter a revolving door behind you and come out ahead.

The symbolism remains, however.  This Sydney Test is the match Warner long ago nominated as his goodbye to whites, in a call that struck some as bold and some as entitled - thereby reinforcing the general sense of ambivalence that accompanied his whole career.  From the instant he arrived, Warner didn’t necessarily divide people as draw them opposite ways to partly overlapping conclusions. He was very exciting but also rather brash.  He was rather brash but also extremely good.  He was extremely good but also crudely aggressive.  He was crudely aggressive but wasn’t that bred in the Australian bone?  It was rare to have a conversation about Warner in which there was either outright approval or total condemnation, at least until Sandpapergate when the latter position did gain adherents.  You had to grant this, to concede that.  There was the further challenge that he also changed, growing up in public, and exhibiting different facets of his personality.  He was the wildest party boy since Shane Warne who became our most visibly uxorious cricketer since Steve Waugh.

His record, compounded of 44.6 average and 70.3 strike rate, is little short of incredible.  There are caveats, of course.  His home average of 58.1 and his away average of 32.5 were a leading indicator of Australia’s struggles on the road during his career. His technique also frayed a bit in later years: take a look at Warner’s maiden Test century on YouTube and you’ll notice how side-on he is, certainly compared to how much of his back shoulder you see now; he never quite resolved how to line right-armers up from round the wicket.  But when you consider how integral he was to Australian success, and how much talent and brain power were applied to defeating him for so long, his endurance is remarkable.

No batter, furthermore, better embodied cricket’s transition from a game concerned chiefly with ‘form’ to a game driven increasingly by ‘confidence’.  This distinction needs some explaining, as the two terms are still seen as vaguely synonymous, or at least entwined: form, recent runs or wickets, is imagined to beget confidence, a positive or optimistic mindset; confidence, in turn, is then imagined a precondition of form.  This, at least, is traditionally how we have explained cricketer’s cycles.  It amounts almost to a superstition, a way of reintroducing human agency to a game replete with randomness and chance, fluctuating conditions overhead and underfoot, and minuscule differences between success and failure.

T20 has changed that thinking in ways we have been slow to acknowledge.  It is a game that apportions a drastically greater influence to luck.  It is a game in which consistency is far harder to achieve, accenting not the reliable but the explosive.  We may see Glenn Maxwell coming in to bat after three single-figure scores; we still know that anything could happen, because his value lies in what he is capable of not what he is guaranteed to deliver, in the height of his ceiling not the strength of his floor.  We still talk about ‘form’ in T20, but it is largely a statistical measure - nothing like the state of sporting grace it once connoted.

The productivity of form being so much harder to sustain, confidence, vested in process, execution and feeling, has loomed ever larger.  Is one’s plan sound? Is one’s mind clear?  Form had been a kind of regression analysis - a forecast passed on previous performance.  Yet the best players had also always been noted for a capacity to rule a line under what was gone, to tackle each day alike.  By T20’s nature, participants are likelier to experience a greater ration of statistical failure, but also offered greater opportunity to rationalise it - sure I failed, but the game made me do it.  Cricket has always reserved a place for such kidology - the ideas that your best is only one innings away, that it only takes one ball to get any batter out. But T20 brings such thinking to the fore.

Warner, as we are constantly being reminded, graduated to Test cricket via T20I cricket. He belied his origins by achieving in Test cricket an enviable, even exemplary, consistency, applying what had always been a basically sound method (and only twice in ninety-eight further T20Is did he exceed that 89 he made on debut against South Africa, just saying).  But from his very first steps in the red ball realm were evident his bags of white ball confidence, his faith in his method.

A sequence in the first series of The Test subtly contrasts the methods of Warner and Steve Smith, as they rejoin Australian colours ahead of the 2019 World Cup.  We are presented with Smith as batting’s Alexei Stakhanov - the worker hero constantly exceeding his quotas, his dedication an inspiration to others.  We are introduced to Warner confiding in Ricky Ponting his resistance to overtraining; he plays his best, he explains, when he’s not fatigued, not overdrawn, a little raw. Warner is the very opposite of a lazy cricketer.  He is an apostle of fitness; so is his wife.  But on the cricket field he never looked other than fresh, with an underlying conviction that the mind would follow the body.  His confidence, moreover, was almost radioactive.  Teammates felt his aura, bowlers his shadow; there was a tone of excitement in the way commentators described him, an air of possibility in the crowd while he was at the wicket.

It happened that this was well-suited to opening the batting.  Scroll through Warner’s under-age career and you’ll see that he tended to bat in the lower middle-order and sometimes bowl, being the stereotypical lair who could bat either hand and wanted to see how far he could hit it - coaches would have preferred leaving the serious stuff to the polite lad with the nice front foot defence.  But on no batter are the calls for resilience greater than the opener, who lives with the knowledge they’ll probably fail a certain proportion of the time through no fault of their own, whose low scores stand out more for their earliness and for the experience of watching others get runs in easier conditions (you can tell I’ve been opening since under-12s, can’t you?).  Warner seemed to brush off failure.  Another recurring memory from 2019, when Stuart Broad had the Indian sign over Warner: for all that his task seemed ever more hopeless, never did Warner seem to drop his head.  It was Ponting’s famous knock on Michael Clarke that the latter was always bright as a button when he made runs, slightly sullen and withdrawn when he did not.  In this very public ordeal of failure in England, Warner preserved an improbable dignity.   

While I remember it, in fact, a little personal cameo of Warner.  During the Delhi Test earlier this year, Warner suffered a brutal blow on the arm and helmet from a Mohammad Siraj bouncer.  It transpired that his limb was fractured and his brain concussed, the latter leading to his replacement in the match, then the former to his being sent home.

The night we learned Matthew Renshaw had been substituted, it happened that Pete Lalor and I bumped into Warner at the hotel.  He was quietly seething; he reported that he had failed only one of the questions in the concussion test, complained that the phrasing was ambiguous anyway, claimed that he was fine and ready to go.  It was a bit like Shane Warne’s fury at being left out at the nadir of his fortunes in the West Indies in 1999, even if Warner wasn’t blaming anyone as Warne blamed Steve Waugh; rather was he remonstrating with the system standing in his way.  The Test was going south; the pitch was a tip tailored to Warner’s old rival Ashwin; Australia’s campaign for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy was in its last hours; but still you sensed the primal urge to prove himself, and the belief that sustained it.

Here’s the Sandpapergate bit, to which I draw attention because it is important but also obligatory.  It is like the unavoidable footnote or the compulsory asterix to Warner’s career.  And there are still things quite peculiar about it, including that for the transgression with which he will forever be associated Warner was never charged under the International Cricket Council’s disciplinary statutes; rather did Cricket Australia penalise him by reference to a higher moral and patriotic code.  Warner was neither leader nor agent in the tampering: these, respectively, were Smith and Cameron Bancroft.  Yet on Warner was levied the heaviest penalty: that of a year’s ban from playing and a permanent ban from leadership.  This, we’re led to believe, is because Warner was culpable for the ‘idea’, although I strongly suspect that the lifetime disqualification from even captaining the Sydney Thunder let alone Australia was calculated to discourage Warner, who for some at CA had come to be regarded as a bit of a nuisance, from coming back at all: he, with his nimble cricket brain and immense native ambition, would have to weigh every future playing day against the nagging sense that he alone in the team could rise no higher.

There’s no need for me to relitigate Sandpapergate - especially having written a book about on the subject.  It was a uniquely crass addition to the annals of Australian unsportsmanship in being so obviously wrong and so sneakily premeditated; it was at the end of a continuum of offensive behaviour by Australian players that had occurred in an environment not just of impunity but of tacit administrative encouragement.  But it will remain fascinating, and defining, as perhaps no other flashpoint in our lifetimes, in the contrast between the clumsy furtiveness of its conception and the full-spectrum exposure of its unravelling.

Lately I’ve been listening to The Rest Is History’s seven-part series on the assassination of JFK and the related conspiracy theories, where a point recurs - that speculation flourishes because nobody can reconcile themselves to the idea that one so mediocre as Lee Harvey Oswald can have loosed such havoc on the world. I sometimes incline to the same view of Sandpapergate, that nobody can believe it was so prosaic because its impacts were so profound; people are dazzled by as much by the unanimity of the reaction as the depth of the malfeasance.  Anyway, feel free to have at it in the comments.  If we’re still debating Bodyline after ninety years, there’s no reason to stop batting Sandpapergate back and forward after six.

Pro tem, let’s celebrate the cricketer Warner.  In utilitarian days when all cricket seems to crave is to be reduced to data, he was a reminder of its theatrical and aesthetic dimensions.  Warner was a massively watchable player: the arcs of his arms as he walked out, the way he carved the crease up with his guard, the little limbo he performed before facing his first ball, the little twirl of his bat under his arm between deliveries, not to mention the busyness with which he peeled and reapplied the velcro of his wristbands.  The cut, the pull, the drives, yeah yeah, all that. But also the bark of his calls, how he accelerated between wickets with legs blurring like the Roadrunner, how he chased, intercepted and bounced to his feet in the field.  A top cricketer’s job is not only to make runs and take wickets; it is to be watched, to leave an impression, to convey a sensation. And from wherever Warner has been on the field since 2008 it has been exceedingly difficult to look away.