You get the sense that David Warner has spent his lifetime looking for a fight. Speak to players who came up against the young version in suburban Sydney cricket, remembering Warner prowling the boundary getting stuck into fielders when he had finished batting. Trace a line all the way to the current era, the old stager version running out on to the field with skipping feet, ready to sway and duck and jab.
All the way through, there has always been a flashpoint, a point to prove. An Indian opener, a Zimbabwe A wicketkeeper, a Cricket Australia head of high performance. Warner has held on to resentments, from peers or opponents or media, and relished the feeling of vindication from some starring subsequent performance. In the end it hasn’t really mattered who, or what, or why. The conflict has been the thing, pushed down inside until it is powerful, some compressed puck of solid-propellant fuel to fire his next launch.
His 2019 Ashes hangs around like London cloud. An iconic batting misadventure, 95 runs in 10 innings with Stuart Broad having him on the rack. Yet it isn’t fanciful to say, if you could say this of anybody, that in some way Warner probably relished the experience. It was a fight, and one where all through he was scrapping from the bottom of the brawl. Every failure raised the degree of difficulty, reduced the chance of success, proliferated the number of people saying he was hopeless. At each restart, Warner ran out there thinking of ways he could prove them wrong.
When he walked off after another failure in the fourth Test that year, Warner had a broad grin on his face. He had gone out there, tried something, it hadn’t worked. Oh well, back to the lab again. Other players may have counted themselves out by the fifth Test, embarrassed by the streak or wanting to avoid more scrutiny. Warner showed up, deluded or not, thinking he could still turn it around.
In 2023, Warner came back to England determined to go again. Where others speculated about a Sydney farewell earlier in the year, Warner wanted a tour of India and another shot at England. He chatted about Broad in a pre-series press conference, about taking the contest to him. The smile was still there. At no time did he seem like someone concerned about taking the challenge on.
Through every innings on his tour so far, Warner has resumed the fight. This is not the player who stood there in Perth in 2012 and pogoed 180 into the stands from India’s bewildered bowlers. He has more limitations now, and plays within them. Batting in England adds its own.
Partly caged, Warner has found a way. First against India in the World Test Championship final, with Mohammed Siraj and Mohammed Shami doing plenty with the ball under dark grey skies on morning one at The Oval. Warner battled through the worst of it and scored 43, the score up to 71 by the time he was out.
In the second innings of the Ashes opener at Edgbaston, his score was 36. Australia had a substantial chase ahead of them, and an opening stand of 61 bit a chunk out of it. Then in the second Test at Lord’s, as in the earlier engagement across town in London, the team sent in, the overheads helpful, the bowling team interested, and Warner reached 66, his best score in the country since 2015, Australia 96 when he went.
None of these innings leap out on the scoreboard as match-defining, but all have done an opener’s job. They have absorbed what should be the trickiest bowling conditions and provided the team with a start. They have annoyed the opposition early and offered cover to the middle order.
They have been achieved in similar ways, Warner back and watchful, or moving well forward to negate swing. Cat and mouse with bowlers as he shifts around the crease. Gauging which balls to leave, which to defend. Picking off singles relentlessly, whenever a gap can be found. Identifying the boundary balls to go after, laying into those so that the bowlers have to worry about the rate of scoring as well as the wicket they want to take.
At no point has Warner looked entirely convincing. As he walked out to bat at Lord’s under the morning’s cloud, every Australian in the stands would have had a phone ping with messages from home predicting disaster. But when conditions have been tough, Warner has found ways to survive. Gradually, he has been building. He may yet prosper.
Warner has never made a Test hundred in England, and with at most seven innings left there is a good chance he never will. He would love to brandish one at those who doubted him and sate that particular resentment. But if he can keep doing a job, to end up on the right side of an Ashes tour ledger for the first time, he might not mind too much. That is the fight he most wants to win.
