Wow, David Warner is batting right-handed!
By now you may have seen Warner’s change from batting left-handed to right-handed in a Bangladesh Premier League match for Sylhet Sixers. It was actually how I woke up thanks to a mate sharing it on Messenger. Thanks, Alan.
But the conditions that led to Warner’s change are arguably as significant as the change itself. At the start of the 19th over Warner had faced 29 balls. He had failed to score from only six of those balls, and the most recent dot ball, the first of the 18th over, was a leg bye, meaning his failure to hit the ball did not mean a complete cessation to the improvement of his team’s score for one ball.
The last time that it had been scoreless ball for both Warner and the Sixers was when Warner had failed to score from the second ball of the 13th over, bowled by Sohag Gazi, Warner’s 14th personal.
Since then, Warner had found a way to at least get down to the other end off a delivery, and it was almost always due to a shot off the bat.
The first ball of the penultimate over by Gayle was no exception; Warner scored two runs. The next two balls, however, saw no runs scored.
Warner felt it was necessary to make the change in how he was standing as a result, before Gayle even started to bowl the ball. The video shows the rest: six, four and four. The score was 179 with an over left. Rangpur Riders would need at least nine runs per over to win.
It turned out to be 9.4. Warner faced only one more ball for the innings. Another dot.
But still a bye.
Since Cricket Australia suspended him from all their professional teams, David Warner has played in the Global T20 Canada, the Caribbean Premier League and now the Bangladesh Premier League. I’ve checked, and over all three leagues he has not scored a single three. This is significant because Jarrod Kimber found he was “the best scorer of threes in the world” before the ban. His mastery was based on mastery of all the common scores of cricket – one, two, three, four and six – not on mastery of just the last two.
In fairness, his last professional innings to contain a three was his last Test innings. That innings was played in the long shadow of the ball-tampering controversy and it was a relatively slow innings – he struck at roughly two thirds of his career strike rate – in pursuit of what would have been a world-record fourth-innings target.
But Warner’s first innings in that match was a T20 innings – 30 off 14. After he copped a blow to the arm from Kagiso Rabada on his second ball, he responded by swinging and essentially didn’t stop swinging until he got out because of it. His dismissal by Rabada was preceded by five consecutive boundaries off the same bowler. His exact scoring shots were five fours, one six, two ones and one two.
No threes.
(Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
Australia don’t need that Warner, not that he’s been able to find that sort of innings since in the aforementioned T20 leagues. They need the Warner that Kimber described in 2017 – the Warner that is at his most aggressive in his running between the wickets, the guy who runs more threes than anyone else.
The people who roar at cricket matches might be at their loudest for his boundaries, but Warner running a three invokes a mental image of people cheering on a racehorse they’ve backed in the final straight of a neck-and-neck contest. Come on, Davey! Come on, Davey!
It’s clear that Warner has had to struggle in T20 since Cape Town. In 21 innings, he has only scored four half-centuries – one in Canada, one in the Caribbean, and two in Bangladesh. He’s scored as many ducks in that time. His only innings in which he has a strike rate of two runs a ball or better lasted just three balls. His second-best innings in terms of strike rate is the game that Sylhet just won against Rangpur – 169.44 (61 off 36).
Anyone who is tempted to declare a false dawn for Warner only needs to remember his last innings – a seven-ball duck. Usually it is assumed that the shortest ducks are the worst. Two of them – a diamond duck and a golden duck – even have special nicknames. But in T20, where the goal is to maximize your resources, wasting seven out of 120 balls is arguably worse when you make no other contribution with the bat.
I say ‘arguably’ because another argument is that one needs to include singles in T20s as a loss for the batting team, albeit a narrower loss. Kartikeya Date has made this argument because the majority of T20 innings, unlike the majority of ODI innings, have a run rate of six runs per over or better. If we were to discount singles as a scoring unit in this way and count major and minor losses in this way, Warner’s loss rate in his innings against Rangpur would be 61.11 per cent – six twos, six fours and two sixes out of 36 balls prevented it being higher – the lowest loss rate out of any innings he has played in professional cricket since Cape Town.
Of course one should take care not to extend the point too far and remember that data is only useful in context. Consider, as an instance, his sign-off to the CPL – he scored 42 not out off 45 balls, which contained 18 dots and 20 singles, meaning a loss rate of 84.44 per cent. Yet that was a responsible innings played in the context of a modest 136 to win and more aggressive partners in Chandrapaul Hemraj and Lendl Simmons scoring at a higher strike rate.
But there is an even more compelling reason to keep a sense of proportion about Warner – he injured himself while batting on Wednesday night and is coming back to Australia. Now he and Steve Smith have to come back from injury as well as suspension, and the world moves quickly – even quicker than David Warner running a three. And the latter hasn’t happened in professional cricket for a while.
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