David Warner exits Test stage with rich tapestry of chaos and artistry

There he goes. Off the ground after a Test innings for the last time. Lost in annoyance at being trapped lbw until more than halfway off, seemingly remembering at that point why there was so much more applause than would normally greet an innings of 57. Pulling upright, spreading his arms to the crowd, turning a full circle as if to take them all in an embrace. There he is afterwards, those lovely post-combat moments on the ground where players’ kids outnumber the players, small figures rolling on the turf or cloaking themselves in streamers, lit up in sunbeams. David Warner chats with his small daughters in between honouring every interview request, happy to keep speaking: retired, but never retiring.

Plenty of people will be glad to see him gone. That attitude is far more prevalent than was represented in the media fete of his final Test series. Few Australian players have drawn as much dislike in their own country. But there was also a crowd eager for the chance to applaud him on to the field to bat, something they had four chances to do across the days and sessions of his final match. In large parts of this audience Warner is forgiven, or at least they recognised that the moment was greater and more distinct than a vague and lingering personal animus.

His saga of baggy green caps lost and found felt a fitting way to start the week. Right from the beginning, Warner has had a wild ability to become the story. Even before his national T20 debut in 2009 – a wunderkind from nowhere, a true smokey, the first since 1877 to play for Australia without a first-class match to his name. If Greg Chappell’s youth policy had many failings, it boasted this singular success. It’d hard to imagine another administrator having the boldness to push for this kid – and two years later, with that first-class match tally on 11, to further push that kid into the Test team.

Before Warner had even produced the kind of crash-bang-wallop knock he was picked for, which he did by teeballing 180 against India in Perth, he had already proved his variety and worth, carrying his bat on a Hobart greentop for 123 in his second Test as the rest fell around him and New Zealand won by seven runs. He set up what should have been an Ashes win in Durham in 2013, made hundreds in two of the three live Tests in the return series, and set up a series win in South Africa with twin tons in Cape Town the same summer. A particular batting genius was being writ large.

All the while it was accompanied by a distinct lack of genius: the verbals, the on-field aggression, the Walkabout scuffle, flaws in character that some celebrated as much as others condemned, until it culminated in Cape Town 2018. Some stains can’t be buffed out, though moralising about ball-tampering is peculiar in a sport that has always featured it, an offence firmly in the list of misdemeanours rather than high crimes. Those who still bring up sandpaper at every mention of Warner are clinging to something, having made their dislike of him part of their identities in a way they’re not willing to relinquish.

Far more than the tampering, Warner was culpable for coaxing a gullible junior teammate to carry out the deed without the smarts or panache to conceal it. And again for denying knowledge while Cameron Bancroft faced the cameras. Warner has still never offered a frank public account, while his praises sung this last week often cited his bluntness and honesty. Concealment usually rankles more than the offence.

David Warner departs from Cape Town airport in March 2018 after the ball-tampering scandal. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

But you can’t define a career so full by a single portion. Not when it ends with 112 Tests played, 26 hundreds, 22 one-day tons while winning two World Cups, plus the T20 equivalent and a World Test Championship. The names with more international centuries make a short and illustrious roll-call: Lara, Jayawardene, Amla, Kallis, Sangakkara, Ponting, Kohli, Tendulkar. Three players made more Test runs opening: Cook, Gavaskar, G Smith. Opening across three international formats: Jayasuriya and Gayle.

All the while he played every IPL season since 2009 except the one when he was suspended, now third on that tournament’s all-time runs list with 6,397. He has probably played more top-flight cricket than anyone in the world since his debut, bar perhaps India’s Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. The dedication required, to physical and mental fitness both, prospering across formats while living out of hotels and in the centre of the spotlight, is not something anyone else can fully comprehend.

For the man who was once a boy heralding the future, something old-fashioned leaves Test cricket with him. The pioneer of the T20 age, the IPL emblem, is also the one who dedicated everything he could to the old style, barely missing Tests with injury, never missing for any other reason except two suspensions, and rather than quitting for the T20 circuit after the second ban, coming back with renewed determination that brought him through his torrid 2019 in England to score a Test triple century and win the Allan Border Medal for Australia’s player of the year.

Test devotion is easier for Australian players, when the match fees are 20 grand a pop and the annual contract might even buy you a house in Sydney. But it was still notable that across this vast career, nothing mattered more to Warner than the chance to play the longest, hardest, most taxing format. Starting a nationwide search when his baggy green was lost down the back of the couch shows again how much this cricket, specifically, mattered. He went on to make that explicit in his retirement interviews.

David Warner celebrates taking a catch to dismiss Joe Root during day four of the third Ashes Test at Headingley in August 2019. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

“The pinnacle of Australian cricket is aspiring to have this baggy green,” he said in one. “I just want to give a little bit of advice to the youngsters out there. Keep your dreams, keep believing. This is the ultimate in cricket: Test match cricket. This is what you want to play for and strive for.”

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This was Warner with an eye on bigger things, in the same way that as one of the highest profile players in the country, he played union shop steward in the industrial dispute of 2017, standing up for women’s players and domestic players that Cricket Australia wanted to cut out of a revenue sharing deal. It was one of his most admirable moments, something his detractors are unlikely to remember or acknowledge.

In the end, facts won’t matter as people form their views on vibes or anecdotes. Those close to Warner or those who encountered his good side will remember good humour and generosity. Those who didn’t will remember churlishness and a talent for grudges. The thing is, you’re allowed to factor in all of that – all the reasons for criticism, all the counterclaims – and still just enjoy the things that Warner the cricketer and Warner the personality offered those looking on.

There was his troublemaking streak, in its more wholesome manifestations: a remarkable ability to wind people up, to annoy opponents, to feign sincerity, to tease false stories at press conferences, like confirming his retirement from one-day cricket in the same breath as claiming he would play the 2025 Champions Trophy. There is plenty to read from Usman Khawaja’s comment that his mother’s childhood nickname for Warner was “devil” in Urdu.

Above all was the on-field entertainer, for that is what he was: the man who two months ago was doing a backward somersault while reverse scooping a ball into the roof hoardings of the Chinnaswamy Stadium during a World Cup match, the opener who hit bombs, who wiped out a kid on the second tier of the Waca before consoling him with a pair of batting gloves, who smoked a century before lunch to start a Test match and was only the fifth ever to do it, the switch-hitter, the occasional right-hander, the kamikaze streak between the wickets or in the outfield, the player who went back to England in 2023 despite a borderline sadistic public interest in his failure and instead helped set up Australia’s two Ashes-sealing wins.

David Warner embraces his wife Candice after Australia’s series victory over Pakistan. Photograph: Mark Evans/Getty Images

The sum is an image full of chaos, of clashing colours and strange figures, part Jackson Pollock, part-Bayeux tapestry, part-LED drone show, and even if the effect of the whole gives you a migraine, there is no denying that there was artistry in its construction. Nor that there is significance in the fact that, a few marginal panels aside, its creation is coming to an end. At the centre remains a character all in white, with absolutely no claim to the angelic. For anyone who has followed cricket, he was part of our lives for 15 years. That means something, as does accepting that complexity exists, and binaries only work for computers. Some people find it easy to hate Warner, and they will tell you so, but for the rest of us, that was impossible. Thanks Dave. It’s been fun.