Excerpt from ‘On Warner’ by Gideon Haigh, the best-selling sequel to ‘On Warne’

A piece from my first book, The Instant Cricket Library, an anthology of excerpts from imaginary, unpublished and other hard-to-find cricket books

Gideon Haigh is the most acclaimed cricket writer in the world. Here he follows his masterful study of Shane Warne with a similarly brilliant analysis of David Warner

PART TWO - THE ART OF WARNER

In a letter to Henry L Sprague in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

It’s unlikely that Warner has studied the former American President’s epistolary output in any notable depth, but perhaps, like Warner’s brother Steve, who once infamously, and with great malapropism aforethought, claimed via social media that his sibling had been made an ‘escapegoat’ (sic), the gist, rather than the nitpicking minutiae, of the English language is deemed sufficient.

For Dave Warner speaks loudly, carries a big bat and has gone far. Often too far.

It is all done in the name of ‘aggression’, of course, the sine qua non of Warner’s cricket. When batting, the impulse for his shot is almost always an attacking one. Warner will defend only if left with no other option; he is, it seems, a man who simply does not know the meaning of the word recreancy.