David the Lionheart

Chloe Saltau in the Age writes, that for some, Australia's David Warner is one of the world's most exciting batsmen. To others, he symbolises a cricket world gone mad, a world in which, as Tasmania batsman Ed Cowan puts it in a new book, "you can be paid a lot more for not being as good as you used to have to be''. Warner knows he is viewed, sometimes scorned, as a short-form specialist, and it's a perception he is trying to change.

Not only because he believes sustained success in the first-class arena is still the best way to earn respect, but because he has realised that he derives as much pleasure from batting for three hours as he does from the pyrotechnics with which he lights up the Twenty20 circuit.