Entertainer or villain? Warner polarised to the end

Whether you love David Warner or feel like his farewell is well overdue, it's unlikely you fall anywhere in the middle.

Like his batting style, opinions about him tend to operate only in the extremes.

He's a busted flush or a generational great. Overrated or a game-changer.

Of course there are absolutes that are warranted.

His role in the 2018 ball-tampering efforts in Cape Town was objectively wrong. Decking Joe Root in a Birmingham bar was an early warning sign and the sort of tale from before stump mics and camera phones that we look back on with a healthy dose of cringe.

In fact, Warner often seemed like a man out of time.

In an era when Australian legend Justin Langer was let go for being too intense for players' liking, Warner feels like an artefact of the Michael Clarke years, when "get ready for a broken f***ing arm" was considered leadership, rather than a pretty silly threat for a grown adult to make to another cricketer.

There was barking at Faf du Plessis like an "attack dog", celebrating an Ashes ton without a hint of irony after getting caught off a slim no ball the previous delivery, and his general combative personality simmering under the surface in a team that no longer wants to be considered the "ugly Aussies".

But that's all down to people's own opinions and we're not here for that. We're here to decipher whether criticism of his cricketing ability and his standing as the first name on Australia's team sheet for the past decade is fair.

Testing times for a brash batter

In Australian men's cricket, the Test match is king.

The Big Bash is a bit of fun but no longer the must-see TV it was for a summer or two in the mid 2010s.

Limited-overs international series seem all too often crammed in between contests of substance.

And our returning ODI World Cup winners arrived back in Australia to the sort of polite but tepid "Oh yeah? Well, good on ya, mate" you'd expect from a family member at Christmas who doesn't entirely understand your new job you just spent 15 minutes describing to them.

Their Indian counterparts wouldn't have been able to walk the streets for months had they got over the line, but in Australia, if it happened in coloured clothing it's just another trophy for the cabinet.

And so Test cricket is the bar by which Warner, second only to Ricky Ponting in terms of runs for Australia across all three international formats, is measured.

That was perhaps no more clearly evidenced than on his return to the international scene in 2019.

Warner's first outing for Australia after his Sandpaper-gate ban ended was the ODI World Cup in England, and he absolutely killed it.

In the face of relentless pressure from the crowd, the man dubbed Bull came out charging and finished second in the scoring with 647 runs in 10 knocks, including three fifties and three centuries, one of which was the highest individual score of the tournament (166 against Bangladesh).

But, whether it was a single-figure score in the must-win semi against England or the fact Australia didn't go on to win the whole thing, his brilliance was quickly pushed to the background as all eyes turned to the Ashes.

If Test cricket is king, the Ashes are god.

And, no matter which way you slice it, that 2019 series was a disaster for Warner, who was already on thin ice after the ball-tampering saga.

Warner averaged less than 10 and scored more than 11 in just one innings - a 61 in the third Test - and while this level of failure was extreme, it was not entirely out of character for a man who never reached three figures in 37 innings in England.

Getting homesick

Away from home, Warner averages 32.50, down from around 45 for his career. But even that's being propped up by an average of 63 in six Tests in South Africa, where he scored half of his six hundreds on the road, all in a prolific 2014 series.

He notched another in Dubai in October the same year, and two others came on a 2017 tour of Bangladesh, which remain his only centuries in his last 76 innings away from home in just over nine years.

Opening partner Usman Khawaja has six across New Zealand, UAE, Pakistan, India and England in the same time span, from 22 fewer innings.

While we're at it, let's compare him to Matthew Hayden, also an aggressive opener who played more than 100 Tests for Australia and in the conversation for Australia's greatest ever.

Hayden finished his career with an average over 50 as an opener, and his record away from home was enviable.

He got centuries everywhere he went except for four Tests in New Zealand and two in Bangladesh, scoring tons on his first trips to India, the Caribbean, Sri Lanka and UAE (against Pakistan), as well as his second tour of South Africa and in his final innings in England in 2005.

Those performances in all conditions meant the gap from his average at home to his number on tour was minimal.

Warner's average abroad is 45 per cent lower than his number in Australia, while Hayden was about three-quarters as prolific overseas as he was on home soil.

Warner's strike rate only dipped to 66 overseas. There didn't seem to be a significantly different approach on foreign soil to the one employed at home.

Stand and deliver. Compact and powerful. Play your natural game, mate.

For decades, players have been selected and dropped for their specific skills in specific conditions.

Khawaja overhauled how he played spin to earn selection in India. Stuart MacGill was basically only picked to bowl his leggies at the SCG and on the subcontinent. Scott Boland might not have a Test career if the MCG hosted the first Test of the 2021/22 Ashes instead of the third.

But Warner, despite a career's worth of evidence to the contrary, was always a "must pick" regardless of the destination because the most recent memory before any big tour was usually a run-plundering summer.

And so it is that Warner has regularly come under fire as a flat-track bully (although saying that this summer might get you off side with Cricket Australia) rather than the historically exceptional opener that raw statistics might suggest he is.

Of seven Australians with 5,000-plus Test runs who played the majority of their career as an opener, Warner is the most prolific in terms of runs scored and innings over 50.

He's one of two men - alongside India great Virender Sehwag - in the top 80 run scorers in Test history with a strike rate over 70.

Also of note are the teams Warner played in.

We can't say that he was coming in with his team on the ropes after a batting collapse.

But unlike Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer and Michael Slater, in the early years of his career, Warner was never coming in after a Shane Warne or Glenn McGrath demolition. Nor did he have the security of a generational batting line-up behind him.

If he failed, Steve Smith (or, earlier, Clarke) was often the only net to catch Australia from collapse.

Warner bore that pressure and often applied it back onto the opponents from the opening over of the innings, usually with a slashing square drive for four. Usually in front of a raucous home crowd.

That brash approach that made him irrepressible when hosting, constantly got him in trouble in places where the bounce is less true.

Proving 'the haters' wrong

And herein lies the contradiction. The "yes, but" of the whole Warner worldview.

After every tour, where meagre returns prompted calls for a change at the top, came the inevitable pugnacious retort come the Australian summer, a particular staple in recent years.

Just endured an historically bad 2019 Ashes in England? How's 154 and 335 against Pakistan in Brisbane and Adelaide?

A top score of 68 in almost three years and an average of 21 from my past 20 innings? Cop 200 in the Boxing Day Test of the summer, Proteas.

Battling through my last trips to India and England? Sorry, Pakistan. Here's 164 to start the summer.

And on the back of all those knocks came Warner's proverbial middle finger to the critics and the hyperbole from commentators about how he was "back" as opposed to doing the sort of thing we'd seen him do for a decade-plus.

There's no shame in scoring runs at home. Averaging almost 58 and striking at 72 across 58 Tests as an opener in any country is immense.

But even on home soil the decline in recent years is undeniable - since his year-long ban ended in 2019 he has averaged 37 (overseas it's 21 in that time) compared to 48 before it, and he hasn't passed 50 more than three times in a single year of Tests, which he did in every full year since his debut in the summer of 2011 through 2017.

That's 38 Tests, more than a third of his career. Not exactly a blip.

But maybe that's not how you'll remember him.

Maybe you don't care about the tours or the late-career struggles.

Cricket is a summer sport and Warner was almost always the best version of himself when the most Australians were tuned in.

Maybe you'll just remember the fun you had when you sat down to watch with your family over the holidays. Because Warner plundering runs against timid tourists became as much a summer tradition as ham and prawns at Christmas.

It wasn't always the clutch tons with Australia under the pump; from that blistering 89 on his international arrival in a T20 against South Africa 15 years ago, it was about entertainment.

And that's the quintessential Warner experience, whether he was in the 10th innings of a brutally one-sided battle with Stuart Broad under cloudy English skies or sending a toothless attack to all parts before they knew what hit them, we were always watching.

The definition of box office, for good or ill.

- This story first appeared on ABC