My favourite moment in 2018 came at about 10.24 p.m on 31stMarch. In fact, for a year, I kept going back onto Youtube to make sure that it had actually happened.
The event was a press conference, and it took place eleven thousand miles away. In keeping with the way we do things these days when things go a bit awry for us, it involved a grown man crying his eyes out, and a journalistic minder making sure that no one asked questions that could further embarrass him or his employers. You know, awkward questions like ‘what actually happened?’ ‘who organized this?’ and ‘who, apart from you, knew?’
To make things even better, the previous two nights’ news had been punctuated by other press conferences, featuring two of his colleagues, equally tearful, saying equally little except how ‘gutted’ they were, and how they hoped that in time they would be forgiven.
But back to the one that had made the cricketing world happiest, the first, involving a 31 year old cricketer of extraordinary talent, who had just been caught cheating. His name was David Warner.
Non cricketers, I guess, will be familiar with the occasional person who is so manifestly unpleasant that you start to wonder how they can actually live with themselves. There, in a nutshell, you had David Warner. It was almost impossible to find anyone in the cricketing world, Aussies included, who had a nice word to say about him. Chippy, bullying, sneering, foul-mouthed, and that was before you got to the really bad stuff…the list was almost endless. And, before you tell me that other teams (certainly including England) have illegally altered the condition of the match ball for unfair advantage, I know that. It’s not the point.
Each of the three players involved was banned for 12 months, and it was assumed by most of us that the other two, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft, would take their place back in the Australian line up once their sentence was up, but that Warner would be shown the door for ever, and absolutely no remission for good behaviour.
Instead, Cricket Australia- the governing body who have left more unanswered questions on this than the Labour Party have with their Brexit ‘policy’- invited all three back, and made the point that Warner would be part of the Aussie team’s summer in England, World Cup and Ashes. ‘Unbelievable!’ we all chimed. ‘They’ve learned bloody nothing.’ And we queued up to deliver our vitriolic opinions wherever he turned up to play his cricket.
But things didn’t work out as planned.
Warner did OK in the World Cup but in the Ashes (the bi-annual contest that we are about to lose yet again), he fell apart. He couldn’t lay a bat on a ball. He got out almost as soon as he got in, innings after innings. So much so that, for a man whose batting average had been nudging 50 a year earlier, he has scored over eight innings the following horror sequence: 2, 8, 3, 5, 61 (during which he played and missed 26 times), 0, 0 and 0. You can do the maths yourself. He became Stuart Broad’s ‘bunny’. He didn’t just not need suncream when he went out to bat, he didn’t actually need a bat.
And you know what? He took his miserable run of form with phlegmatic calm and good humour. The man who used to celebrate personal milestones with a sickening dick-swinging, chest-beating roar, took it all in good part. After another disastrous innings, he would just walk back to the pavilion with an enigmatic smile, greeting the occasional piece of abuse from the crowd (‘Warner, you’re a f****g cheat!’) with tolerance and politeness. And, in his miserable run of form, and in the way he has dealt with it, come two annoying pieces of self-knowledge for many of us.
First, as soon as someone starts to fail and to diminish on a regular basis, we start to feel sorry for them, and it all produces a tiresome qualification on the pure dislike we once felt. We might deny it, but we deceive only ourselves.
Secondly, it reminds us that, whoever we are, and whatever we have previously done, we have the capacity to change if we want to.
Tonight, David Warner, I take it back. Not all of it, but most of it. Not forever, but for now. You are more of a man than the drunk who told you to ‘fuck right off’ when you walked back in this afternoon. I hope you re-find your mojo.
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