Warner win no surprise, and it’s good for cricket

THE Australian Cricket Awards got what they’ve been craving on Monday, a tablespoon of controversy.

David Warner winning — and in the process — polarising opinion is a good result. This is what the medal has been missing for two decades.

It was only a few years ago that interest had reduced so much in the night formerly known as the Allan Border Medal, that it was raised whether the concept should continue.

Players were emphatic they wanted The Medal to stay, and like it or not, Warner is a deserved winner.

Warner’s emotional speech showed how much the recognition meant to him after his 12 months of banishment and turmoil, and equally the social-media reaction — both good and bad — showed that the punters cared as well. And for it to mean something is all you can ask for with a major award like this, because there is no perfect system.

Much of the public scepticism has centred on how Warner could be crowned player of the year, when in the centrepiece Test series of that period, the Ashes, he had a stinker.

It’s a fair criticism, and Warner himself took the extraordinary step of apologising for his performance in England on stage on Monday night.

But it’s worth pointing out that the coldest and hardest judges of all, the bookies, devoid of all sentimentality, had Warner the short-priced favourite to take out the award.

Therefore his win was hardly the turn-up of the century.

Most would agree that Test cricket should be weighted higher … and guess what, it is, by some margin.

Test votes are given a weighting of six, compared with one-day cricket which is given a weighting of three, and then T20 cricket, which comes with a weighting of two.

The best explanation of what likely happened on Monday night is that Steve Smith with his Ashes heroics, Marnus Labuschagne with his golden summer, David Warner with his decimation of Pakistan and Pat Cummins with his unyielding consistency, in many ways, cancelled each other out on Test match votes.

So then it came down to the white-ball formats to decide the AB winner, and on that front, there can be no argument that Warner was the No.1 Australian player of the year.

Rather than focus on the Ashes anomaly, the more reasonable question to ask in a year where Cummins finished the world’s leading wickettaker by the length of the straight, is whether the system is too biased towards batsmen? The fact only four bowlers have won the award in two decades would suggest it might.