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.
At the time it was talked up as the worst series return by a genuine batter in 10 innings. Not quite: England’s Plum Warner made 89 runs in South Africa in 1906, a shocker of a tour decades before he had another managing the Bodyline team, and the West Indies legend Learie Constantine had a chastening visit to Australia in 1931-32 worth 72 runs. That still leaves Warner with bronze on an undesired podium.
Other context includes a batch of Dukes balls that made life difficult for all openers. Where Warner averaged an easily calculable 9.5, Cameron Bancroft got sacked averaging 11 flat, Jason Roy got sacked averaging 13.75, and Marcus Harris saw out the series averaging 9.66. In a way, Warner was a victim of his own success, backed to stay in the team and turn things around even when he was struggling.
But then, it’s easy to forget that Warner was not waved through for 10 failures. After four low scores, he began the Leeds Test by scoring 61 under cloud so dark it was almost a night match, surviving repeated rain resumptions on what the ball-tracking data affirmed was the most difficult batting day of the summer. Bowling out England cheaply to follow, his innings gave Australia a lead that should have been matchwinning, if not for Ben Stokes and the final‑day miracle.
Naturally, Warner was picked for the fourth Test, with the hope that he had turned a corner. After failing there, the only options to replace him for the fifth were Bancroft and Usman Khawaja, who had already been dropped themselves. By then there was little point.
Even so, this time he will not get nearly so much rope. Two failures will be excused, four would likely be the end. Harris has spent three seasons in county cricket improving against English styles of bowling. Matthew Renshaw has spent seasons with Somerset and Kent. If Broad resumes a chokehold, Australia will tap.
Warner is not the dominating presence he once was. He still carves boundaries through the off-side, but with more sense of risk, less of inevitability. When the going is tough – and to start an innings it is always tough – he makes sportswriters turn to metaphors of old boxers, ducking and weaving and jabbing, raging against the dying light. Even during his 200 against South Africa last Boxing Day, that was the style, battling through to an increasingly rare chance to swing back hard.
Perhaps a combatant who can tactically use the ropes can do a job for Australia this series. That was Warner in the World Test Championship final, facing down a searing spell from Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj after India chose to bowl first on a cloudy morning. He guarded his stumps, letting swing beat the edge, smothering it when straighter, then flaying six boundaries in 25 balls when the bowlers changed and the pressure came off.
That 43 was exactly the sort of in-between score that can be ignored or amplified however the onlooker chooses. What it did was get Australia almost through the session, setting things up for Travis Head to come in after lunch without an emergency to attend to and get on with smashing his own eventual hundred. Do that in England and an opener has done a job.
Keeping the job in mind is Warner’s challenge and perhaps his salvation. With an ego as powerful as his forearms, he is all too aware of 2019. He will want to take down the home bowlers, especially Broad. He is also canny enough to know he has to survive first. When Broad takes the ball it will start one of the most anticipated individual contests in any Ashes. A contest that will either be Warner’s last or will win him the right to decide what happens next.
