OPINION

On the long honours board of unloved Australian cricketers, the name David Warner gleams bright. And the lippy, pugnacious opener has become a particular irritant for Kiwi fans.

But as he dons his beloved
(and recently returned) baggy green for the final time, perhaps we should reassess our antipathy for our antipodean cousin.

In English-speaking countries, cricket is still largely a sport of the privileged. It can be a painfully expensive game for kids to get into and many of the players taking the field for England, Australia and New Zealand were fortunate to come from backgrounds that were comfortable enough to allow them to develop. In these environments, class still counts.

Warner came from the other side of the tracks. He’s a blue-collar guy in a white-collar code, and in cricket guys like that tend to have the lens on their every action. Our own Jesse Ryder did himself few favours when the limelight hit, but he seldom had a chance to step out of the light.

Even by the usual standards of the Alternative Commentary Collective’s nicknames, dubbing the Aussie opener “Davey Dumb Dumb” seems particularly cruel. It underlines the extent that Warner got under our skin.

It was the same in the 1980s, when the MCG’s Bay 13 chanted “Hadlee is a wanker”, speaking volumes of the impact the New Zealand fast bowler had on the Aussie team and its fans.

It’s not just Kiwis. Warner gets a decent serve from crowds when touring England and Ben Stokes singled him out as being particularly lippy. Like us, they delight in his failures. Much gets made of the fact he punched Joe Root in a Birmingham pub, but the fact he did it because he thought Root was making a racist gag about Hashim Amla is less discussed.

When he scores a century, he gets grief about celebrating too hard. Pray tell hardened keyboard warriors: how hard would you celebrate if you scored a test ton?

Warner somehow shares the unfortunate knack of many Aussie athletes of having a highly exportable unlikeability.

The high point of Warner’s villainy is well known. In the wash-up from Sandpapergate, he was found to be the mastermind of the scandal in which the modern-day cheating of Australia’s cricket team was laid bare. The vice-captain of the team, he was handed a 12-month ban from the sport, along with skipper Steve Smith. Hapless newbie Cameron Bancroft was sent to the wilderness for nine months.

The ball tampering was certainly not a decent thing to do – in fact, it was outright crooked. But carrying the can for his teammates shows that ultimately the bloke found a sense of duty and responsibility.

Do you really think the bowlers had no idea the ball was being touched up? They say you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be excellent at it; after all the hours the Australian bowlers had bowled in matches and training sessions all their lives, they would have come to have known every thread of a cricket ball. At a glance, a top test bowler could tell you roughly how many overs a ball had been used, how hard it had been hit. But when one side has been sandpapered? Nah mate, no clue.

There were no bowlers sitting alongside Warner and Smith in their notoriously tearful press conference. Warner knew he had done wrong, and to his credit he owned it.

The sandpaper will be remembered, but the runs should too. Alongside India’s Virender Sehwag, Warner has been one of the greatest openers of his era, averaging 44.58 in tests, 45.3 in ODIs and 32.88 at a cracking 141.3 in T20s. And he’s a demon in the field.

Black Caps icon Kane Williamson rated him highly as a player and a mate when the pair were teammates at Sunrisers Hyderabad, and journalists who have dealt with him say he speaks with clear passion and insight for the game.

If the rest of us are just hating on Warner because he’s the wrong class for his chosen career, then we’re the real villains. It’s time we showed a bit of class.

Winston Aldworth is NZME’s Head of Sport and has been a journalist since 1999.