WARNER THE WALLY
The rise and fall of a loudmouth Australian cricketer
Kaboom! The word is actually the trademarked name that adorns David Warner’s supersized bats, evoking the destruction he has wrought on opening bowlers in recent years, but the term could equally apply to the way that he approaches any situation, on the field or off.
Wherever Warner has ventured in the course of his extraordinary career, he has never gone about his business quietly and has always taken his exclamation mark with him.
He landed on the international stage with a bang, the first player for 132 years to represent Australia before he had played a first-class match, announcing himself to the world in strident tones with a riotous 89 from 43 balls in a twenty 20 victory over South Africa at the MCG in 2009.
And now, nine years later, he has been forced from the scene to a chorus of boos after his tricks against the same opponents, uncovered as the prime villain in an episode of sporting infamy. Whether we hear from Warner again in international cricket remains to be seen.
If he walked into your dressing room, you would know he was there, even as a 22-year-old sampling county cricket for the first time with Durham in 2009. ‘‘He was brash, confident, everything you’d expect from an Aussie, really,’’ said Will Smith, the Durham captain at the time.
‘‘He had a huge belief in his own ability and, whenever we lost, he’d be disgusted, verging on angry. He was an incredibly fierce competitor.’’
If the test in Cape Town does indeed prove to be Warner’s final outing in the baggy green, it will be fitting, given his track record, that his career came to an end in a blaze of controversy. ‘‘He’s a risk-taker. He doesn’t look at the world in the same way we do,’’ Greg Chappell, the former Australia captain, once said. ‘‘He doesn’t look at batting the same way we look at it, and that’s why he is what he is.’’
With the bat, he became a trailblazer for the twenty 20 generation, the first to make the leap from the shortest form of the game to test cricket without a significant compromise in his playing style. Plenty more have attempted to follow, but few have made the transition so convincingly.
Yet that tendency towards selfdestructive risk has never been far away. His charge sheet with the authorities began when he was sent home from Australia’s academy, along with Mark Cosgrove and Aaron Finch, for the heinous crime of failing to keep his room tidy.
Then there were the drunken tweets aimed at Australian journalists during the Indian Premier League in 2013, followed swiftly by an equally inebriated punch infamously aimed at Joe Root in a Birmingham bar.
All the while, the backing track has been provided by his mouthy on-field persona, relishing the role of attack dog, snapping and snarling carefully coined phrases in a batsman’s earshot. Jonny Bairstow, after the brouhaha of his supposed headbutt on Cameron Bancroft before the Ashes series, was a notable recent target.
Sledging, of course, has been a feature of Australian cricket for many years, but Warner, being Warner, took it upon himself to push the boundaries still farther. His behaviour on the field led Martin Crowe, the former New Zealand captain, to describe him as ‘‘the most juvenile cricketer I have seen on a cricket field’’.
In recent seasons, though, Warner had been noisily proclaiming how quiet his life had become. He had settled down and married Candice Falzon, a former international triathlete, and become a doting father to two daughters. He lent his name as a co-author to a series of children’s books, knowingly titled The Kaboom Kid. After his run-in with Root in Birmingham, he had given up alcohol and embraced mindfulness.
The transformation was so marked that team-mates took to calling him The Reverend. And the authorities were sufficiently convinced to entrust him with the vice-captaincy of the national side. But there had been little apparent change in the way that Warner conducted himself on the field. Had the leopard really changed his spots? Had the rough edges really been knocked off the spiky son of Matraville, a working-class suburb southeast of Sydney? Eddie Jones, the England rugby coach, comes from the same part of town and there is the unmistakable art of a streetfighter in both of them.
His success, and the financial rewards that have come from almost a decade in international cricket and several IPL deals, mean that he now lives a few miles east of Matraville on the coast. But the relish for confrontation remains, seen clearly even in the recent pay dispute with Cricket Australia.
Warner was the players’ attack dog once more, thrusting himself to the forefront of negotiations, issuing threats that the players would boycott the Ashes series if their demands were not met.
‘‘We won’t buckle at all,’’ he said at the time. ‘‘We want to keep participating for our country as much as we can. But, if we don’t have a job, we have to go and find some cricket elsewhere.’’
The threat was of its time, an illustration of the player power created by the proliferation of twenty 20 competitions that are threatening the international game.
Needless to say, though, the approach did not endear Warner to his employers and, now that he has fallen so spectacularly from favour, he will indeed have to go and find some cricket elsewhere. In more ways than one, the international game will be a quieter place without him.
The Times