Mitchell Johnson: David Warner might deny it, but criticism drives him
Mitchell Johnson feels the opinions he expressed in his explosive column on David Warner before the start of the Perth Test between Australia and Pakistan are ‘still valid’ and that criticism drives the southpaw, despite his claims to the contrary.
Johnson stirred up a storm a couple of weeks back with his column on The West Australian where he tore into his former teammate David Warner. Johnson wrote that Warner had never properly owned up his role in the infamous ball-tampering scandal of 2018 and that he didn’t deserve to pick and choose when he would retire.
“It’s been five years and David Warner has still never really owned the ball-tampering scandal,” Johnson had written. “Why a struggling Test opener gets to nominate his own retirement date. And why a player at the centre of one of the biggest scandals in Australian cricket history warrants a hero’s send-off?”
Warner had expressed earlier this year that the Pakistan series will most likely be his last in Test cricket. Following Johnson’s scathing comments, Warner started the series on a bang, scoring a typically attacking hundred on day one of the first Test in Perth.
He celebrated the hundred with a ‘shush’ gesture which he later admitted was aimed at the media and for ‘anyone who wants to write stories about me’. In the second innings, however, Warner was dismissed for a duck.
Johnson, who was part of the commentary team with Triple M during the Perth Test, wrote another column for the same publication where he doubled down on his opinions from the one he wrote two weeks back.
“I think my opinion in this column a couple of weeks ago is still valid. He hadn’t scored runs in about three years apart from the double century last summer,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson argued that this home season was always going to be an easier one compared to the coming season and that it was a good opportunity to give youngsters some game time.
“Another point made was that a soft summer like this, with Australia expected to comfortably beat Pakistan and the West Indies, was the perfect time to look at blooding some new players into an ageing team.
“They could have given some new guys some really good time out in the middle this summer and backed them in. That’s going to be much harder across the next two summers when India and England visit for five-Test series.
“It seems they’ve got their own plans in place for selection and how they see things. But they are going to be confronted by a changing of the guard at some point soon,” Johnson wrote.
Following his hundred, Warner had said that outside criticism doesn’t effect him. Johnson, however, didn’t buy that and wrote that it was one of the driving factors behind success: “David Warner’s century on the first day of the Australian Test summer was no great surprise in some ways.
“There was a big media spotlight on Warner and his form and he seems to be at his most motivated when backed into a corner and he generally saves his best for home soil,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson added that Warner only did his job by scoring the hundred and was lucky to do so: “On day one Warner rode his luck early on — and it could have gone either way — and you take that and he went on to make 164.
“He did what he was paid to do in the first innings before Saturday’s duck in the second innings. Warner may have denied he cares about criticism of his form, but it definitely does drive him as shown in his performance in the first innings.”
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