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Take a bow David Warner. In a high profile but not particularly crowded field, he has distinguished himself as easily the worst exponent of sledging in international cricket.
David has been castigated this week over the ugly fracas that erupted at the end of Day 4 of the first Test. But what is sorely missing is any sort of discussion on how utterly hopeless he is when it comes to sledging.
Putting aside the issue of whether or not the verbals, chirps, insults, sooks etc from the Australian cricket team has a place in the game, there can be little doubt that David Warner is sorely lacking in the skills needed if wants to be a great mouth.
He is not funny
Every single sports fan on this website knows the great sledges of cricket and knows them incredibly well. Merv Hughes and Viv Richards, Rod Marsh and Ian Botham, Mark Waugh and James Ormond, Glen McGrath and Edo Brandes.
There is simply no more effective way of bagging someone than with a hilarious take that makes them look stupid. On the other hand, Warner’s career sledging highlight is to yell at Rohit Sharma to ‘speak English’.
His brand of yapping, foul-mouthed abuse is as memorable as being cursed by a deadbeat teen outside Wyong Kmart and not nearly as effective.
He’s not discrete
As a background to this, I confess to a manly love for Steve Waugh, his stoic and stubborn approach to challenges has been an inspiration for my entire adult life. He was also an incessant sledger and the evidence of this is, is, well there was the line he said to Herschelle Gibbs, and the blow up with Curtly Ambrose – and that is it really.
Everything else he said was sly and sneaky enough to stay on the field and under the radar. In contrast, Ryan O’Connell made a brave defence of Warner’s rap sheet yesterday and made one thing clear. He has no skill at all at doing something on the field which doesn’t create an incident.
Waugh is a gentlemanly Rotarian who later turns out to have been a cat thief. Warner is the guy with no license because he repeatedly gets caught not wearing his seatbelt.
(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
He’s not effective
Which bring us neatly to the key point of sledging, upsetting and unsettling your opponent. If you are doing it right, the opposition is rattled and not playing their best. Even better, you cause your target so much angst they lose their cool.
David Warner’s mouth has completely unsettled, no-one since the start of his career. His batting has been extraordinary, on debut against South Africa he hit so well that they were forced to scramble their very best bowler out of the attack just to try and unsettle his rhythm.
But his on-field sledging has been a lost cause, no more sharply illustrated than the fact that this latest incident occurred at the end of a day where his long attempt to unsettle Quinton De Kock had been a dismal failure.
All of this aside though, he could carry on sledging to his heart’s content if not for the fact that…
He can’t play
I mentioned in the previous point that the ultimate aim of any sledging has to be the unsettling of an opponent. Well David spent hours trying to get at De Kock who after the play, (yes after the play!) managed to sledge him so well that he lost his cool and are about to be suspended.
Did De Kock cross a line and verbal Warner’s wife? Should this be off limits? Did Warner verbal De Kock’s family?
It doesn’t matter. If you are happy for players to abuse each other on the field during a cricket match but want to have a discussion about the boundaries of what is and what isn’t acceptable, you have missed the entire point of sledging.
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The only reason you verbal someone is to upset them by saying something they find unacceptable. This does not mean anything goes, and any comment about family, gender, race, religion is fair game on the field. Far from it. If David Warner had laughed in De Kock’s face, and then made an official complaint to the match referee we would have a completely different outcome.
But if you are going to lose your cool and get suspended when someone sledges you, then maybe you shouldn’t be sledging them! Unfortunately, one of the brightest cricket talents of this generation with the bat is intent on being remembered for his lack of talent and self-control with the lip.
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