It really doesn’t seem any great surprise that David Warner should be in Australia’s Ashes squad. But actually, for a man who has 103 Test caps and 25 hundreds to his name, his case is oddly weak.

Here in the UK, it’s about the time of year when people start getting a bit overexcited about the half-forgotten phenomenon of a warm sunny day. The first one of the year tends to arrive on a weekday and in offices and warehouses up and down the land, young folk discuss their weekend plans and a unanimous exclamation rings out: “Beer garden!”

As you pause your picking and packing, or your emailing, or your spreadsheeting, and gaze out of the window at a sun-drenched car park, it’s only natural to imagine yourself sitting in a bucolic idyll with a beer and no responsibilities. The mistake people make is in confusing a moment of relaxation with a full-day plan.

As someone who once worked in a pub with a beer garden, let us tell you that there is nothing more hellish than a sunny bank holiday. Maybe there’s a crude caricature of that idealised vision of an al fresco pint for one or two early starters, but it doesn’t take long for everyone else who’s had the same bright idea to downgrade the ambience. Nor is this a scenario where starting early is likely to work out well for you in the long run.

By 5pm you’re basically looking at an open air version of the Gem Saloon, only with a lot more litter and detritus because the pub hasn’t been staffed to deal with a sixfold increase in clientele. There’s a constant irritable queue at the bar, so no-one has time to collect the empties.

If no-one’s been knifed or shot dead by closing time, then the landlord will count up the takings, chalk it up as a win and deal with the post traumatic stress later.

All those people who thought “beer garden!” and envisaged calmly lounging around in the sun – this is what they actually get. But then they forget. They’ll think the same thing again the next year. Maybe even the following week.

The point is, some things in life consistently fail to measure up to our expectations, but somehow our expectations remain the same.

Which just about brings us back to David Warner, who almost certainly wouldn’t have been picked for this summer’s Ashes if he weren’t David Warner.

What do we mean by that? We mean that everyone remembers all those many times that Warner has been a fantastic batter and those memories rather mask the fact that his case for inclusion this time around is fundamentally a story of uselessness.

We’d pick him, by the way. We’d pick him because he’s canny and skilful and committed and above all just an incredibly fun addition to any Test series, no matter who you’re supporting.

Breaking down David Warner and Nathan Lyon’s run-out of AB de Villiers – one of the most disrespectful dismissals in history

But he is also a batter who has been given 25 Test innings in the UK without ever making a hundred. That’s a lot of chances even before you factor in that he averaged just 9.50 over the course of his last series in England. That whole Stuart Broad v David Warner recurring castastrophe was freakish but also a symptom of something fairly predictable.

And it’s not like his performances in England are some weird aberration. If you play 103 Test matches, you give people a pretty clear idea what you can do. Warner averages 26.04 in England; 26.90 in the West Indies; 25.22 in Sri Lanka; 21.78 in India; and 13.00 in New Zealand. He has hit a hundred in precisely none of these places.

Warner’s 25 hundreds break down like this: one in the UAE, two in Bangladesh, three in South Africa, 19 in Australia.

That last one’s exceptional. How can you not pick a guy who’s made 19 hundreds in just one country? The sun’s out, the whole summer’s ahead of us, let’s give this thing another whirl.

Yeah, we’ll be doing stuff on the Ashes. Take the easy option and get our coverage by email.

Say what you like about tax-dodging symbol of the horrors of modern global commerce, Amazon, it knows how to promote a documentary series about the Australia Test cricket team.

Series one of Amazon Prime’s The Test was notable for footage of Justin Langer kicking a bin over, among other things. Next week series two becomes available. We imagine it’ll begin with Langer’s and Tim Paine’s departures.

Amazon have this week seen fit to promote the show with a promotional video in which David Warner plays Nathan Lyon at the board game Test Match (one of the few things with a name as uselessly ungoogleable as The Test).

This is a very exciting thing.

It’s not exciting to see which of them wins, because Test Match is not a game of victory and defeat. Test Match is a game of desperately trying to make things semi-work in the face of the game’s own massive failings.

So what’s actually exciting is to see precisely how the game has moved on in the 30-odd years since we last played it.

And let us tell you right now, Test Match has moved on MASSIVELY.

Back in our day, the bowler would deliver the ball (bearing) down a chute. Nowadays, he actually flings the thing via a p’twang mechanism.

This literally adds a whole new dimension to the game because previously the ball remained on the deck. This whole new dimension presumably reduces the likelihood of batter hitting ball or bowler hitting stumps considerably, thus making plausible cricket action even harder to engineer.

It is therefore no great surprise that gameplay is apparently largely shaped by byes. SHAMEFUL CHEAT David Warner even goes so far as to try and claim byes when the ball is stopped by a slip fielder within the two runs zone.

When runs are achieved, they are generally scored by picking up the batter and plinth and basically wielding the entire contraption as a bat.

For example, we can exclusively reveal that one of Warner’s fours actually came of the batter’s face.

Apparently a little less willing to sacrifice others for his own personal glory, Lyon was unable to match Warner’s run tally and lost the match.

There is further controversy here though because at one point Lyon’s batter is given caught behind off the glove and it definitely looks like arm to us (albeit the ball is massive relative to the batter and could therefore have hit both upper arm and glove simultaneously).

You can watch the highlights here.

Here’s a thing we did about another of the highlights from series one of The Test: How Adam Zampa and Marcus Stoinis are pissing away the great legacy of David Boon.

‘David Warner b Naveen-ul-Haq’ really doesn’t do it justice. You need to see it. Or at least have it described to you alongside a handful of stills.

The switch hit is right up there with cricket’s most hubristic shots. It arguably even surpasses the quite-possibly-smashing-it-straight-into-your-own-face peacocking of the ramp shot.

When you switch batting stance even before the bowler has bowled, what you’re saying is, “I think I am still way better than you even when I am batting wrong-handed.”

The fact that switching stance almost always precedes a ferocious wallop only magnifies that message. It was very entertaining therefore to see all of that implied strut drip away from David Warner in instalments.

Warner went for the switch hit against Afghanistan’s Naveen-ul-Haq today.

Just to underline that this was a premeditated thing…

Position A:

Position B:

Having made the decision to deploy the show-off heave, Warner got his bat right up in the air, ready to give it some humpty.

Unfortunately for Dave, the delivery turned out to be an unhumptiable off-cutter.

Recognising this, Warner had a rethink and instead selected the flat-footed prod as probably the best shot available to him given that he was batting the wrong way round and no longer had any real clue where his stumps were, other than somewhere vaguely behind him.

There they are, Dave – splattered.

Here’s another angle so that you can more clearly see how really very crap this shot was.

As you can see, we have added a caption to the image above, even though that is a thing we almost never do. The caption is ‘crap’.

What you can’t immediately see is that the image filename is crap.jpg

As he walked off, Warner swished his bat angrily through the air.

He swished right-handed.

Get our email, you frippet.

The First Crowd-Free T20 International between England and Australia saw the home team engineer a position where they would have to play very well and Australia very badly to secure their desired result.

England did their bit and so too did Australia, in large part thanks to David Warner’s nondescript 58 off 47 balls.

“It was the first time I’ve been here and not got abuse. It was quite nice,” said the opener afterwards.

There’s long been this idea that David Warner plays better when everyone abuses him, even though there have been countless occasions when even the mere perception of an argument has caused him to self-destruct. But maybe there’s a happy medium. If his soporific performance in this match is anything to go by, maybe he needs just enough booing to keep him awake.

Australia captain Aaron Finch had a different view on why his team lost though.

“T20 games are about making sure you take on your options and matching that up with the right gameplan,” he explained.

It is not clear at this point whether Australia failed to ‘take on their options’ or whether they failed to match the taking on of their options with the right gameplan.

If they can work out which and also what that actually means then expect them to come back strongly in the next game.

4 minute readMany things happened during Australia’s win in the first Test of their ill-fated 2018 tour of South Africa. Some of them were cricket, some of them were David Warner falling out with people. The thing that interests us the most – AB de Villiers’ second innings run-out – fell somewhere in between.

Let’s break the moment down, because it was really quite something. We’re struggling to think of a more disrespectful dismissal.

The context

The South Africans were near enough 200 runs behind on first innings and had then found themselves chasing 417 to win.

They quickly fell to 39-3 and so had basically lost. You wouldn’t think there was much left to get het-up about at this point, but then you’re not David Warner.

David Warner is, you suspect, the kind of man who snaps the remote in half in fury when the batteries start to get a bit low.

The run-out

Nathan Lyon dobbed one down the leg-side and South Africa opener Aiden Markram nurdled the ball towards David Warner.

As Warner scuttled round to get it, AB de Villiers set off down the pitch before doing a big U-turn when he looked up and saw only Markram’s back.

Sadly for de Villiers, he’d gone sufficiently far that the run-out was never in doubt. Warner was grinning even as he threw the ball.

At the bowler’s end, Lyon enveloped the ball with his Mekon hands and duly broke the stumps.

Nathan Lyon’s bit

What we didn’t mention was that AB de Villiers was on nought, having only faced one ball. Now here he was lying on his face, run-out in a match his team were about to lose.

Being run-out is always rubbish because to some extent it’s always self-inflicted. It’s worse still when you end up literally lying on your face in the dirt at the moment it happens.

Here’s AB de Villiers literally lying on his face in the dirt having been run out for a duck in a match his team is about to lose.

What happened next was that Nathan Lyon saw AB de Villiers literally lying on his face in the dirt having been run out for a duck in a match his team is about to lose and thought to himself: “This isn’t quite humiliating enough. I think I need to ramp this up a bit. I need to really emphasise the fact that AB de Villiers is literally lying on his face in the dirt having been run out for a duck in a match his team is about to lose.”

So Lyon ran past, looking down at him, and to emphasise that de Villiers was both literally and metaphorically fallen, he dropped the ball near him.

You’ll note that we italicised ‘nearly’ in that last sentence. As you can see, Lyon is looking directly at de Villiers even having passed him and is dropping/flinging the ball as he does so. You could maybe, if you so chose, argue that he dropped the ball at de Villiers.

David Warner’s bit

Lyon could not have executed his run-out and ball-drop without the assistance of David Warner. Warner too was hugely keen to emphasise the fact that his team was winning the Test match.

Presumably feeling that the surviving batsman had escaped lightly, he chose to convey his team’s supremacy to Aiden Markram.

Australia wicketkeeper Tim Paine said at stumps that there “wasn’t too much aggression” during Warner’s send-off (which technically wasn’t actually a send-off because Markram wasn’t going anywhere).

Here is Warner’s Hatred Face midway through said send-off. We’re pretty sure we have never been this angry with anyone about anything in our entire life.

Now we want you to understand something at this point because it doesn’t really come across in stills. Warner is aiming this face AT Aiden Markram. Aiden Markram is the subject of the hatred.

All of Warner’s team-mates came and mobbed him for doing the run-out throw and yet he physically struggled with them to ensure he retained a direct line of sight to Markram.

A direct line of sight to Markram was important to Warner because he didn’t want there to be any miscommunciation about just how much he hated him

It doesn’t really need stating explicitly, but obviously as well as making the face, Warner was  saying things at Markram.

And yes, ‘at’ is the right word here. David Warner was most definitely not saying things to Aiden Markram; he was saying them at him.

First published in March 2018.

Today on Cricket 365, we’re asking (and then answering) the question, ‘Which of Stuart Broad’s seven David Warner dismissals was the most enjoyable and why?’

Here’s a link to the article so that you can easily find and then read it.

David Warner looks like the top half of his head spent a year at home and the bottom half of his head spent a year in the literal wilderness.

The top half of the head has been drinking frappuccinos and eating plenty of vegetables. The bottom half of the head has… seen things.

The top half of the head says nothing at all. The bottom half the head says: “We were… It was all so… Sorry, it’s just all so raw. I don’t know if I can talk about it yet.”

I wrote more about David Warner’s beard as my latest Did You See for Cricket 365. Go there immediately, read it and then report back.

The story of international cricket in 2018 is really just all the stuff that happened with Australia. This seems a bit narrow and exclusive for an end-of-year retrospective, so we thought we’d instead focus on all the funny things that happened in 2018 to try and broaden it out a bit. Having taken this approach and then edited it all down a bit to make it more concise, we were left with… all the stuff that happened with Australia this year.

To try and inject a note of tension into proceedings, let’s try and work out which character involved in this saga was the funniest.

2018 began, like so many of its predecessors, in January

Remember the Ashes? We pretty much don’t, which is a measure of (a) how much has happened since then and (b) our memory.

Australia began their year by beating England by an innings and 123 runs in the fifth and mercifully final Test. (We did a series review from an England perspective, which is quite interesting to read almost a year later with the benefit of hindsight.)

After the Ashes, the two sides parted ways. England went to New Zealand and Australia went to South Africa. At this point they both engaged in a rather more ferociously contested battle with each other to attract the least desirable headline. England honestly must have though they’d emerge victorious when they were bowled out for 58, but Australia had something metaphorically up their sleeve and literally in Cameron Bancroft’s pocket.

The series in South Africa deserves a bit more attention than that though because there was plenty that preceded the (spoiler alert) sandpapering of a cricket ball like a massive bunch of cheats.

The preamble

Australia gave early notice that they planned to attain new levels of abject twattiness when David Warner and Nathan Lyon ran out AB de Villiers.

This was such an obscenely perfect example of how massively cockish that Australian side had become that we can’t believe it isn’t mentioned in every single po-faced ‘analysis’ piece that looks back on what happened.

Just look at David Warner’s ‘celebration’ face and tell us this isn’t a very unpopular cricket team in facial expression form.

A short account of the run-out goes like this: Warner threw the ball to Lyon, de Villiers dived to make his ground, and Lyon ran him out. Lyon then tossed the ball near de Villiers as he ran off to celebrate and sort of laughed at him while he lay face-down in the dirt. Warner celebrated by turning into Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, hurling pure visceral fury in the direction of Aiden Markram (who wasn’t even out).

Here’s a longer account.

It was very very funny because there was no way of watching it without thinking that Warner was a complete bell-end and it’s rare for anyone to attain quite that level of unarguable pantomime villainy.

Later in the series, there was an even funnier incident involving Warner – funnier because that previous incident fed into it. The short version of this one is that Warner pissed Kagiso Rabada off royally by hitting him for successive fours and then a six and then a ball later his stump was sent cartwheeling towards the sightscreen.

Here’s a longer version of what happened and it’s worth a read because as well as being hilarious, this was also the finest cricket moment of the year; a moment so unutterably perfect that it’s hard to imagine how it could ever be improved upon. We’ve got a warm glow just thinking about it.

The actual ball-tampering bit

Australia planned to tamper with the ball, tampered with the ball, attempted to cover-up tampering with the ball and then, once they were flat out of options, admitted tampering with the ball and claimed it would never happen again and hoped it would all go away. (It didn’t. People are still writing surprisingly long articles about it in December.)

The incident itself was funny for all sorts of reasons. The rank incompetence would get many people’s votes. The cover-up when Cameron Bancroft slipped actual sandpaper down his actual pants was a highlight too. But the funniest element – surely surely surely – was that the team had spent the preceding years roaming the world like sporting morality consultants, delivering unsolicited lectures to anyone and everyone on what is and isn’t acceptable on a cricket field.

The aftermath

Immediately after they’d been caught, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft tried to explain what had happened and in so doing told some absolutely inexplicable lies. Bancroft put forward as a mitigating factor that he didn’t actually use sandpaper but something akin to home-made sandpaper that he’d created using tape and dirt.

1. Who cares, Cameron? What’s the difference?
2. Oh no, turns out it was sandpaper after all

Then things got even funnier. Or at least the headlines did. Fox Sports suggested that amid all the recriminations David Warner had ‘gone rogue’.

Going rogue mostly involved (a) sitting on his own at one point and (b) drinking Champagne with some friends who weren’t cricketers.

At this point it’s hard to see how anyone could top Warner to be named Australia’s Funniest Cricket Character 2018, but there is one more contender, so please bear with us.

In the next Test, Australia got bowled out for 119 when they were chasing 612 in the final Test. What a tour! We tried to work out exactly how bad it was here.

The after-aftermath

It was widely agreed that Steve Smith, David Warner, Cameron Bancroft and Darren Lehmann shouldn’t be Australia cricket people for a little while and then a bunch of administrators were asked to find something else to do too.

It’s easy to replace international cricketers. First-class cricket is basically a very protracted job interview, so you’re always fairly well informed who should take over from the guy you’ve just suspended. Coaches are sort of similar, but cricket boards tend to make them have an actual interview as well.

After doing a bit of that, Australia appointed Justin Langer and the very first thing Justin Langer did was talk absolute world class bollocks.

Deploying the term ‘elite mateship’ was definitely the funniest bit, but to be honest the whole first interview was an absolute tour de force.

This was very much a sign of where Australia planned to go post-sandpapering and Langer swiftly proved himself very much the man to lead the way. New captain Tim Paine also stepped in when necessary, even though he otherwise seems to be a broadly sensible person.

The root of Australia’s moral malaise had been a complete inability to comprehend that there was no universally agreed upon ‘line’ separating acceptable behaviour from unacceptable behaviour.

After an unusually protracted bout of navel-gazing during which this fact should have become abundantly clear, Langer emerged to inform us that the line is what separates “banter” from “abuse”.

If this sounded not in the least bit clearly-defined to anyone outside Australia, Paine added: “We know what’s right and what’s wrong, so it’s pretty simple.”

Then, almost as if to emphasise that it really really wasn’t pretty simple at all actually, Michael Clarke weighed in with some vintage Clarkian nonsense and poor Justin Langer got all confused. (Honestly, with their unwavering belief that everyone sees and accepts exactly the same lines that they do, you can’t help but conclude that Australian cricketers probably think they could draw the India-Pakistan border right through the middle of Kashmir and everyone would be totally fine with that.)

Langer also tried to explain what in heaven ‘elite honesty‘ meant, as a consequence of which we discovered that he’d once used the phrase ‘elite humility‘ – a term so magnificently wrong-headed and contradictory, we wouldn’t have believed it was a real quote if all of the above hadn’t already made it immediately apparent that of course it was.

So in its year of comedy, who was Australian cricket’s most valuable player?

Michael Clarke’s appearance was really little more than a strong cameo, while Steve Smith’s performances largely hinge on the idea that he was Australia’s captain in the first place.

That leaves us with three main contenders.

Cameron Bancroft (a) put sandpaper down his pants and (b) told a really weird and pointless lie about whether or not it was actual sandpaper.

David Warner (a) carried on like a right one, (b) got hilariously bowled by Kagiso Rabada and (c) ‘went rogue’.

Justin Langer (a) said ‘elite mateship’, (b) said ‘elite honesty’, (c) said ‘elite humility’ and (d) just absolutely did not remotely understand that there isn’t a line.

Verdict: We’re going to give it to Langer.

Bancroft’s work was very obvious and in all honesty a bit Route One. Warner performed well, taking the trouble to build himself up sufficiently that it was all the funnier when he was knocked down, but it was still very much a surface comedy.

In contrast, Langer’s pronouncements are both immediately ridiculous but also carry a lot of slow-burn promise for the future. While it’s already a bit tiresome to see people making fun of him by using the word ‘elite’ all the time, the fact that this in no way dissuades Langer from using it is very high grade comedy in itself.

To that, we can add a looming spectre of a joke that we for one simply cannot wait for. At some point in the not-too-distant future, an Australian cricketer is going to do something that most people will agree is unacceptable. Langer is then going to refer to his own unique definition of ‘the line’, assume that everyone else shares exactly the same view, and then he’s going to tell us why the Australian cricketer didn’t cross the line and why we’re all wrong to think that he did.

To an elite 2019!

4 minute read

Absolutely the best recent headline about Australia’s ball tampering is the one on Fox Sports suggesting that David Warner has ‘gone rogue’.

The evidence for David Warner’s rogue-going is that (a) he was sitting on his own at one point and (b) he drank Champagne with friends who weren’t cricketers.

Based on this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we have also gone rogue, because (a) sounds rather lovely while (b) is definitely something we’ve done at weddings and female birthdays.

What is however stated less explicitly is (c) a general vibe that Warner is distancing himself from the team and is also kind of furious. Unnamed players have warned that there could be an ‘incident’ (which, admittedly, could just mean that one or two of them want to lamp him) and there’s a sense that throughout the tour he’s been gradually drifting further and further into Davidwarnerland where David Warner makes the laws and David Warner enforces the laws and everyone else is somehow in the wrong.

If you’re reading articles elsewhere today, there’s a good chance you’ll come across a sentence along the lines of “there’s a growing feeling that Warner was the ringleader” and this probably feels fairly credible to you.

Let’s bulletpoint the circumstantial evidence.

• David Warner is an off-field arsehole
• David Warner is an on-field arsehole who likes to ‘get involved‘
• David Warner was until recently Australia’s ball maintenance guy

The third of those is probably the only one that’s truly of relevance because we all know there are plenty of arseholes who don’t tamper with cricket balls.

Several UK newspapers have run a story that Warner told England players how he used the strapping on his hand to knacker up the surface of the ball a bit during the Ashes.

Here is a picture of Warner’s hand during the Port Elizabeth Test (thanks to Darryl for pointing this out to us).

This image raises three important questions in escalating order of importance:

• Does David Warner really need that much strapping?
• David Warner puts his wife’s name on his bandages?
• What the hell does it mean that David Warner puts his wife’s name on his bandages? That means something, right? There’s no way that doesn’t say something about their relationship. (His kids’ names are also on there, but very much as afterthoughts.)

It’s important to point out that Warner is right-handed, so he shouldn’t have required assistance writing the names. (Several of you will no doubt feel that he probably did require assistance writing the names anyway.)

There has also been a suggestion that Cameron Bancroft only became Ball Management Guy after a dressing room attendant spotted Warner putting sandpaper in his strapping during the second Test at Port Elizabeth. This claim has the general air of being not enormously true based on the vagueness of the source, but we mention it anyway because you never know. We certainly wouldn’t bet big money against it and not just because we already have a lot of outgoings and to do so would therefore be somewhat irresponsible as well as juvenile.

The most compelling case for David Warner as ringleader has been put forward by journalist Geoff Lemon. He thinks Warner’s smarter than he’s generally given credit for (which, in all honesty, isn’t actually all that hard given the public perception of him) but he says he’s also prone to wild mood swings and high aggression. Even never having met him, those qualities just seem instantly and 100 per cent believable.

Lemon doesn’t think Steve Smith can control Warner and instead just tries to accommodate him. He thinks the South Africa experience has got to Warner and that he’s increasingly been driven by what he perceives to be righteous rage. Under a weak captain and an indulgent and protective coach who lacks perspective and self-awareness, you can see how that kind of an attitude might lead Warner towards ever-darker parts of the grey area and incrementally on from there.

An alternative view, which we’ll put forward for balance, is that David Warner is a very convenient and beautifully appropriate fall guy.

We were in a police line-up once. It was when we were at university. We can’t remember exactly how it came about, but we think that someone from the police came onto the campus and said that they needed young men with short dark hair to make up the numbers. So we went down to the station along with a bunch of other short-dark-haired middle-class students and stood next to a lad from the estate with somewhat longer hair and then the person came in and said it was the lad from the estate and we all got a tenner and went and bought ourselves ten pints.

The point is, take almost any conceivable combination of current Test cricketers, line them up alongside David Warner and then ask people to guess which one’s been a dick. Doesn’t even matter what the crime is – who are people going to pick? People are going to pick David Warner because he’s a dick.

The idea that Australia did something wrong and that Warner was 99 per cent responsible is an easy thing to accept because it just seems so fundamentally plausible.

Warner too will be aware of this. He’s spent most of his career feeling like everyone’s got it in for him and while there’s a dash of paranoia and a soupçon of insecurity in that assessment, it’s also pretty much fully accurate and correct.

The man himself, you feel, will have a strong sense of the way the wind is blowing this week and might therefore have concluded that he might as well ‘go rogue’ before he’s officially banished. Why wait?

3 minute read

Here at King Cricket, we’re not at all in favour of unnecessary on-field aggro: fielders over-celebrating dismissals, bowlers getting right up in the batsman’s face and all that.

However…

We are HUGELY in favour of adrenaline-fuelled cricket – particularly when it involves a true fast bowler and a batsman who comes across as maybe being a bit of an arsehole.

It is just such a tremendously watchable feature of cricket. In what is ostensibly a team sport, you have two guys who hate each other basically going head-to-head, the guy with the bat making the guy with the ball hate him more and more and more until finally there’s a moment of catharsis.

And you know what? Sometimes all that bad stuff that we totally don’t approve of actually helps give rise to this kind of thing.

So let’s entirely overlook the cause and instead celebrate the effect because David Warner and Kagiso Rabada had a thing today and it was very much amazing and fun.

Rabada began by hitting Warner on the arm. It was his second ball and already we had the physio on.

Strapping in place, Warner promptly popped Rabada for four next ball.

The ball after that was a leg-bye and he got off strike.

The next Rabada over, Warner was facing again. First ball he nearly chopped on and got a single. Back on strike, this is where things really went up a notch because he hit the final three balls of the over for four.

The first was a legitimate cover drive, the second was a definitely-going-after-this-guy-no-matter-what scythe thing and the third one was off his pads.

And it continued.

The first ball of Rabada’s next over was, as you might imagine, short.

It went for six.

We’re not sure exactly what you want to read into this, but Rabada’s next delivery was a no-ball.

That also went to the ropes.

So that’s Rabada v Warner, five boundaries on the bounce. What would you absolutely 100 per cent most definitely want to see happen at this point?

Just stop and think. Imagine that you know in advance that this is the last ball you’re going to see. Things aren’t going to build up any more that this. This is the finish. What do you want to see?

Cartwheeling stump! The finest sight in sport.

After that, Usman Khawaja walked out and everyone felt a bit deflated and a load of people switched off.

Honestly, this might just have been the most perfect passage of cricket there’s ever been.