David Warner\u2019s 15-year international career came to an anti-climactic end on Tuesday as Australia were dumped out of the T20 World Cup in excruciating fashion. Australia and Warner could only watch on powerless as Afghanistan instead reached the semi-finals by beating Bangladesh by a nail-biting eight runs. Australia\u2019s fate had hung in the balance after India defeated them by 24 runs in St. Lucia on a day of high drama. The 37-year-old opening batsman Warner had always said the World Cup in the United States and Caribbean would be his farewell to international cricket. He couldn\u2019t have imagined going out quite like this. The combative Warner stood tall at the top of the Australian order ever since his international debut in January 2009, and as opening partners came and went. He hangs up his pads as arguably Australia\u2019s greatest three-format player. He is the country\u2019s leading run-scorer in T20 cricket with 3,277 from 110 games. Warner exited a glittering 112-Test career in January after plundering 8,786 runs at an average of 44.60, with a strike rate of 70.19. His one-day exploits were equally impressive, crunching 6,932 runs from 161 matches. Warner was also one of the most consistent slip fielders in the game, whose name was among the first on the team sheet. \u201cHe is probably our greatest-ever three-format player. He\u2019ll be a loss,\u201d Australia coach Andrew McDonald said recently. \u201cOther people have been gunning for him for a period of time, but for us internally, we\u2019ve seen the great value and what he brings to the table, hence why we\u2019ve kept picking him.\u201d Tarnished But for all his exploits on the pitch, Warner made enemies along the way and will forever be remembered for his key role in a notorious ball-tampering scandal in 2018. Warner was seen as the chief plotter when Cameron Bancroft used sandpaper to scuff the ball before a crude attempt to conceal the evidence down his trousers during a Test in Cape Town. Along with skipper Steve Smith, Warner was suspended for a year by Cricket Australia, stripped of the vice-captaincy and banned from ever leading the team. Warner, who will continue to play T20 cricket in leagues around the world and will also be a commentator, admitted this month he would always be tarnished by \u201cSandpaper-gate\u201d. \u201cI think it\u2019s going to be inevitable that when people talk about me in 20 or 30 years\u2019 time, there will always be that sandpaper scandal,\u201d he said. He feels he has been unfairly singled out. \u201cWhether it\u2019s people who don\u2019t like the Australian cricket team or don\u2019t like me, I\u2019ve always been that person who has copped it,\u201d he added. For that reason, Warner said he was looking forward to international retirement. \u201cOne can only absorb (so much),\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s great to go out knowing I\u2019m not going to cop it anymore.\u201d \u2018Different side\u2019 Warner was always an assertive presence and his involvement in \u201cSandpaper-gate\u201d was not a surprise to many. In June 2013, he was suspended and fined for punching England\u2019s Joe Root in a Birmingham bar on the eve of the Ashes. \u201cI\u2019m extremely remorseful. I have let my teammates, Cricket Australia, the fans, myself and my family down,\u201d said Warner at the time. Two months earlier he was similarly contrite after an ugly Twitter spat with two Australian journalists. Despite the controversies, he kept bouncing back. Former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting said Warner was a tough competitor, but a different person off the field. \u201cI\u2019ve heard a lot from Davey recently about people making judgements about him from the way they see him play his cricket,\u201d he told reporters at the World Cup. \u201cOnce he\u2019s retired and he makes that next step of life into the media, you\u2019ll see a totally different side to him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Warner\u2019s 15-year international career came to an anti-climactic end on Tuesday as Australia were dumped out of the T20 World Cup in excruciating fashion….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18245,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}