Why David Warner’s Ashes contest with Stuart Broad will decide his Test fate

The pugnacious opener had a shocker in 2019 but knows that if he can defy his nemesi, he can also be choose how his career ends

Two weeks ago, when David Warner spoke of exiting Test cricket in Sydney next 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 only happen 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 Warner’s 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 across 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 early 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.

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