David Warner is still waiting to hear what went wrong with his one-day career.
Remember whirlwind Warner last summer?
He brought the biff back to Twenty20 with an incredible 83 against South Africa. The kid was promptly introduced to the opening spot in the one-day internationals in the hope he would be some sort of meta mix of Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden.
In the six 50-over games he played Warner scored 5, 61, 1, 22, 7 and 2 before selector Jamie Cox tapped him on the shoulder.
The selector said ‘thanks pal, you’re not playing today, pack your bags you are no longer in the squad. Give us a call sometime and we’ll chat’.
And that was all she wrote.
You might, like Warner, have thought the selectors would have been on the Cricket Australia mobile telling the young man what they wanted. But no.
“It was disappointing,” Warner said yesterday. “Obviously I know what the reasons were, obviously you have got to put a good performance in every three innings and if you don’t do that you are going to get dropped. My goal is to be a bit more consistent this season and hopefully I can work on that.
“You always want feedback, you want as much help as you can get, but at the end of the day it’s up to the individual and that’s me. The onus is on me to score runs and if you don’t, you are going to suffer the consequences.”
Warner’s plan for 2009-10 is to play for NSW in the Champions League and then try to break the door down to get into the Shield side.
The 22-year-old left-hander has lived life backwards, appearing for Australia before he made his first-class debut and struggles to get a spot in the four-day team.
NSW has an intensive warm-up session next week before heading to India early next month with Victoria for the Champions League.
Warner’s Indian Premier League side, the Delhi Daredevils, also qualified for the tournament and there was talk he might play for them, a move which would have earned NSW $230,000 compensation.
Delhi decided, however, that with Virender Sehwag expected to be fit, it did not need the Australian.
Warner says he would not have played for them anyway.
“I was kept in the loop, but my decision would have been to stay with NSW, it’s my home state and you have to stay loyal, that’s where I come from,” Warner said. “I would not be playing for Delhi or for Australia if I didn’t play for NSW.”
NSW is happy to have Warner’s firepower at the top of the order and every team in the competition is happy Delhi doesn’t have Sehwag and the Australian opening.
Warner went to the IPL hoping to get a few hints from the hard-hitting Indian, but was surprised at the reception he got.
“He came up to me and asked me how you hit the ball so far when you are small yourself,” Warner recalled. “I just said I go to the gym.
“The one thing he asked me was what do I do when I go out there and it was something I was going to ask him. I said ‘mate I watch the ball and try and hit it’ and he said ‘mate, that’s exactly what I try and do’.
“You learn a lot from all those experienced players over there, little things you might not have learned back here.”
Warner said that the way Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir attack the ball in the first hour of Tests for India gave him hope that one day he and Phil Hughes might be opening for Australia, if the selectors were willing to go down that path.
He says that he was looking forward to catching up with the other young NSW batsman who has had a rugged ride in the past few months.
“I’ll be seeing how he felt and how he’s coping with stuff at the moment,” he said. “We are two young guys, there’s setbacks in life, this is one of them and that’s the hurdle we’ve got to jump.
“We are both tough little guys and we are going to get over the hurdle.”
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