When David Warner spoke two weeks ago of exiting Test cricket in Sydney in January, some criticism was predictable. How presumptuous, it ran, to announce his plan as though it was up to him. Like a lot of criticism, it came from those who weren’t paying attention. Warner had accounted for that explicitly, naming a hometown farewell as his hope rather than his expectation, one that would happen only if he played well enough to stay in the team.
Standing between him and that hope is another Ashes series in England, Warner’s fourth. Nothing casts so long a shadow over this series as what happened in his third, in 2019, when he stumbled and stuttered to 95 runs in five Tests while falling every time to Jofra Archer or Stuart Broad.
