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David Warner has been critiqued for most of his career but few pundits have rankled the reformed wild child quite as much as Brendon McCullum.
A humdrum lead-in to the three-Test series between Australia and New Zealand heated up on Tuesday, when Warner teed off at McCullum.
The Black Caps’ skipper was critical of Warner during the Ashes in his capacity as a newspaper columnist, calling on the pugnacious opener to show more respect.
McCullum took exception to photos that suggested Warner failed to applaud England’s Joe Root after a century.
Problem is Australia’s new vice-captain insists he clapped for five minutes.
He remains filthy about the slap down, effectively calling on McCullum to zip it and get off his high horse.
“I don’t quite understand how a current cricket captain decides to play this brand of cricket on the field which is the Mr Nice Guys,” Warner said two days before the first Test starts at the Gabba.
“And, then all of a sudden, think he can comment on the way an Ashes series has panned out.
“He doesn’t know what it’s like to play in an Ashes.
“He should actually just watch the game and try and work out what they have to do to try and beat us instead of commenting on it.
“That’s something I found a bit weird at the time … he wanted to do that and obviously he got paid for it.”
Warner clipped McCullum for a separate “poor and immature” piece on Steve Smith, also taking aim at the NZ veteran’s commitment to play a more-congenial brand of cricket.
“You’re not playing for the spirit of cricket award are you? You’re playing for a series,” he said.
“Our goal is to be No.1 in all formats and we’re always going to fight for that.
“We try not to cross that line. A couple of times, we’ve headbutted it; a couple of times, we might have crossed it but we’ve got to try and win every game.”
Warner promised the new-look Australian team would maintain traditional aggression.
“We play in-your-face cricket,” he said.
“That’s probably why we dominate in Australia. That’s something we are not going to stop.”
Mitchell Starc also vowed Australia would be “headbutting that line”, seeking to rattle NZ in similar fashion to this year’s World Cup final.
“I didn’t say too much at all, so you might have to ask the guys who were a bit more vocal,” Starc said.
“If you get rid of their big names and their more-experienced players early and really get a bit aggressive … the younger guys, I think, they go really back into their shell quite a bit.”
Starc suggested the World Cup winners would draw confidence from their seven-wicket thumping of the Black Caps in the MCG final.
“We’ll definitely be reminding them that we’ve bowled them out for 150 and 180 on very good wickets,” the left-armer said.
“It’s nice to be playing in Australia and taking on guys that probably haven’t played too much cricket in these conditions.”
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