Bangladesh vs Australia: David Warner goes from bludgeoner to caresser, banishes subcontinent woes

David Warner is not a grafter he is thrasher.  He is the enforcer that loves sending the leather ball rocketing to the boundary with his three-pound willow. Warner’s game has been built around hitting the ball hard and amassing runs at a rapid rate. It is the game plan that has yielded him 18 Test match centuries and over 5000 runs before he landed in Bangladesh last month. But this impulsive brand of batting had also proved to be his undoing on the slow tracks of the sub-continent.

Warner’s statistics in Asia before the tour of Bangladesh had been widely publicised and criticised. He was averaging a mere 27.12 on the slow and low pitches in Asia with only a solitary ton to his name.

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[caption id=“attachment_4017883” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] David Warner had shelved his ego to have a successful run in the sub-continent. AP[/caption]

It was crunch time for Warner and he had to acknowledge that changes had to be implemented.

To succeed, Warner firstly had to accept there was a problem, something he was naive about during Australia’s Test series in Sri Lanka last year. The left-handed opener was still of the belief in Sri Lanka 12 months ago, that the game plan that had served him so well in his career would lead to success on the sub-continent.

Three Test matches later Warner could only manage 163 runs at an average of 27.16. Eight months later in India, it was exactly the same story. Warner averaged a paltry 24.12 in the four Tests resulting in his overall average from the 17 Test matches to dip to below 30.

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For a world beater, such as Warner often the problem resides in accepting there is a crisis. While it is equally important to stick to the strengths of the game, there are times techniques need to be tinkered and ego’s need to be shelved.

The Bangladesh tour called for desperate measures and Warner realised time had finally arrived to digress from his self assured game plan. No longer could he rely on his fast and hard hands to smack boundaries nor could he continue to back his attacking instincts.  He needed to devise a game plan based on sound defence, bidding his time at the crease and accumulate runs by nudges and deflections.

One of the blunders in this technique against slow bowling was that he was constantly getting struck on the pad from off-spinners bowling around the wicket. In the first Test match in Dhaka, he altered his method by taking a leg stump guard and planting his front foot down the line of leg-stump rather than across towards off-stump. It ensured his front pad was not impeding his bat swing and he could get his willow in front of his pad.

Next adjustment he made was that he was prepared to play the spinners of the back-foot and use the third-man area as a scoring zone.  During his hundred in Dhaka, he scored 38 runs in that region while in Chittagong, he had managed 39.  Compare that to India and Sri Lanka, where he had only managed to score 72 runs in that area from his 14 outings at the crease.

Warner’s strategy of trusting his defence and his plan of playing the spinner off the back foot allowed him to manipulate any ball that was marginally short into the vast spaces behind point.

Often in the past Warner was caught on the crease to these balls, he was not confident coming forward to, but in Bangladesh he had learnt to play with soft hands and with a slightly open blade. It had enabled him to rotate the strike a lot easier, while on his previous crusades in Asia, his only option had been to either sweep or run down the pitch like a mad man. But in this series, he waited for the ball to come to him rather that going towards it.

In Dhaka, he rarely hit the ball in the air, but still rotated the strike with ease by simply playing the ball right under his eye and going deep into the crease.  Warner’s ability to manoeuver the ball into gaps off the back foot had disrupted the Bangladesh spinner’s length and it eventuated in him receiving plenty of loose deliveries that he could dispatch to the boundary.

While his hundred in the first Test was about trusting and executing his new methods, his hundred in Chittagong was all about shelving his ego.

The pitch in Chittagong might have been easier to bat on but the slow nature of it made it difficult for any batsmen to hit boundaries.  Bangladesh knew it and they tested Warner’s by applying boundary riders all over the paddock in the hope of the Australian opener playing a brash shot. They waited and waited, but to Warner’s strong mindset he ensured they waited longer. Incredibly, he only hit six boundaries and took 209 balls to bring up his century, the slowest of his career.

Hard to believe this was the same man that scored a hundred before lunch on the first day of the Test match in January this year. On that memorable day in Sydney, Warner faced only 78 balls and hit 17 scintillating boundaries.

In Bangladesh he had transformed his game from a bludgeoner to a caresser. Warner had found a way to still be prolific by deviating from his natural game. He had discovered, runs could still be accumulated without thrashing the cricket ball, and playing off the back foot to spin bowlers was no cardinal sin, and wearing the bowlers down by virtues of singles was also an art of batting.