An explosive opener and one of cricket's most polarizing figures. From bar fights to Sandpapergate to a lifetime leadership ban, Warner has been at the center of numerous controversies.
31 incidents documented
Australia vs South Africa
24 March 2018
Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera using sandpaper to tamper with the ball during the Cape Town Test, leading to bans for Bancroft, captain Steve Smith, and vice-captain David Warner in the most damaging scandal in Australian cricket history.
Australia vs South Africa
24 March 2018
David Warner had to be physically restrained after charging at Quinton de Kock in a staircase at Kingsmead, reportedly after de Kock made comments about Warner's wife Candice.
Australia vs South Africa
3 March 2018
The Warner-de Kock feud set the toxic tone for the entire 2018 Australia-South Africa series that culminated in the Sandpapergate scandal.
Australia vs South Africa
24 March 2018
Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera using sandpaper to tamper with the ball during the third Test at Cape Town, in a plan hatched by David Warner and known to captain Steve Smith, leading to unprecedented bans.
Australia vs England
12 June 2013
David Warner punched Joe Root in a bar altercation during the Champions Trophy, leading to a suspension that set the tone for a hostile 2013 Ashes series.
Australia vs England (off-field)
13 June 2013
David Warner punched Joe Root in the face at a bar in Birmingham during the ICC Champions Trophy, leading to Warner's suspension.
Dominions XI v England XI
1945-08-27
Three months after VE Day, Keith Miller hit 185 for a Dominions XI against England at Lord's, the highest score of an unforgettable post-war summer. He went from 61 not out overnight to 185 in 99 minutes on the third morning, striking seven sixes — including one over the press box that landed in the upper tier and another that cleared 170 metres into Block Q. Wisden called the match 'one of the finest ever seen' at headquarters; Miller's innings, more than any other in 1945, told English audiences that pre-war balance of power had been broken.
England v Australian Services XI
1945-05-19
Less than two weeks after VE Day, England and an Australian Services XI began a five-match Victory Test series at Lord's that ended 2-2 with one drawn after a final-day finish at Old Trafford on 22 August 1945. Played as celebration cricket and watched by 367,000 people across three grounds, the series re-introduced first-class cricket to a war-weary Britain, launched Keith Miller and confirmed Lindsay Hassett's quality as a captain. Although first-class only — neither board would grant Test status to Services teams — the series functioned as a public reopening of cricket and is the foundation of the modern English summer calendar.
Army XI v Royal Air Force XI
1944-07-29
On 29 July 1944, before more than 3,000 spectators at Lord's, an Army XI played the Royal Air Force in a wartime charity match featuring Wally Hammond. About an hour into play, a German V-1 'doodlebug' flying bomb cut its motor directly overhead. Players and crowd flattened themselves on the turf; the bomb dived to earth roughly 200 yards short of the ground. Bob Wyatt picked himself up, completed his interrupted run-up, and Jack Robertson lofted the very next ball into the Grand Stand for six. Plum Warner later said the moment summarised what cricket meant to wartime London.
India / England
1933-04-02
On 2 April 1933 Ranjitsinhji — Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, England Test cricketer, leg-glance pioneer and the most famous Indian-born sportsman of his generation — died at Jamnagar at the age of 60. His death prompted a global cricket obituary and gave the Ranji Trophy, founded the next year, its name.
Australia v England
1933-01-14
On 14 January 1933 a Larwood bouncer felled Australian captain Bill Woodfull over the heart, the crowd nearly came over the fence, and that evening MCC manager Pelham Warner walked into the home dressing room to be told, 'There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket, the other is not.' The exchange leaked, the Adelaide Test became the diplomatic flashpoint of Bodyline, and the most famous sentence in Anglo-Australian cricket entered the language.
Australia v England
1933-01-16
Two days after Woodfull was struck over the heart, Australian wicketkeeper-batsman Bert Oldfield top-edged a Harold Larwood lifter into his own temple at Adelaide. The blow fractured his skull. Crucially, the field was conventional — not the leg-theory cordon — but the crowd did not know that. Mounted police lined the boundary as Oldfield was carried off; the Adelaide Test came within a single Australian Board decision of being abandoned.
Australia v England
1933-01-18
On 18 January 1933, two days after Bert Oldfield's skull was fractured in Adelaide, the Australian Board of Control cabled Lord's accusing England of 'unsportsmanlike' play. The MCC's reply offered to cancel the tour outright. Two more cables, the intervention of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and a quiet retraction of the offending word were needed to keep the series alive. It is the most consequential cable exchange in cricket history.
Australia vs England
2 December 1932
The 1932-33 Bodyline series: England captain Douglas Jardine directed Harold Larwood to bowl short-pitched leg-theory at batsmen's bodies to stop Don Bradman. Nearly caused a diplomatic rupture between England and Australia; England won 4-1.
England
1932-08-12
In August 1932 the MCC selectors confirmed Douglas Jardine as England's captain for the 1932-33 tour of Australia, a decision contested at the highest levels of English cricket and one that — combined with Plum Warner's appointment as tour manager — would set the conditions for the Bodyline series.
England v Australia
1930-08-16
With the series locked at 1-1 and the Ashes on the line, Bradman walked out at The Oval and made 232 across two days. Australia won by an innings and 39 runs, regained the urn, and finished a series in which Bradman had averaged 139.14. It was the innings during which Douglas Jardine, watching from the pavilion, began thinking seriously about leg theory.
Nottinghamshire and English county cricket
1928-09-30
Across the 1927 and 1928 county seasons the 23-year-old Notts miner Harold Larwood took 100, 138 and then 138 wickets — establishing himself as the fastest bowler in England and securing his place in the 1928-29 Ashes side that would, four years later, take its leg-theory plans to Australia.
England v Australia
1926-08-18
Recalled to the England side aged 48 years and 165 days, Wilfred Rhodes took 4 for 44 in Australia's second innings at the Oval in August 1926, helping to win England's first Ashes series since 1912. He remains the oldest man ever to play Test cricket.
Australia vs England
1912-02-09
Jack Hobbs (178) and Wilfred Rhodes (179) put on 323 for the first wicket at Melbourne, setting a Test record that stood for 22 years and remains England's highest opening partnership against Australia more than a century later.
Australia vs England
1912-03-01
England's seam pair Sydney Barnes and Frank Foster shared 66 of the 95 Australian wickets to fall as Plum Warner's MCC side, captained by Johnny Douglas after Warner fell ill, lost the opening Test in Sydney and then won four in a row to take the series 4-1.
England
1910-12-15
Wilfred Rhodes had begun his Test career in 1899 batting at number eleven for England; through 1910-12 he was promoted up the order until, on the 1911-12 tour of Australia, he was opening with Jack Hobbs. The transformation produced one of cricket's great opening pairs and culminated in the 323-run stand at Melbourne.
Australia, England
1909-08-31
Montague 'Monty' Noble played 42 Tests for Australia between 1898 and 1909, captaining 15 of them and winning eight. A medium-paced bowler whose 'spin-swerve' (an early form of off-cutting in-swinger) and a top-order batsman, he scored 1,997 Test runs at 30.25 and took 121 Test wickets at 25. He led Australia to the Ashes win at home in 1907-08 and the away win in 1909.
Australia, England
1907-12-13
Charlie Macartney, picked as a left-arm spinner with handy lower-order batting, made his Test debut at Sydney in December 1907. Kent's KL Hutchings, observing Macartney's confident demeanour at the wicket, dubbed him 'The Governor-General' — a name meant ironically (Macartney was barely 21) but one that stuck for the rest of his career.
South Africa, England
1906-01-04
On 4 January 1906 at the Old Wanderers, Johannesburg, South Africa beat England by one wicket in the first Test of a five-match series — their first Test victory at the 12th attempt. Dave Nourse's 93 not out and Gordon White's 81 carried the home side past 284 in the fourth innings; the South African googly quartet, all on debut in the same match, took 11 wickets between them.
England, Australia
1905-08-21
Captaining England for the first time in 1905, Stanley Jackson won all five tosses against Joe Darling, topped both batting and bowling averages on either side (492 runs at 70.28; 13 wickets at 15.46), and led England to a 2-0 series win to retain the Ashes. He retired from Test cricket immediately afterwards, never having toured Australia.
England, Australia
1904-03-05
Pelham 'Plum' Warner captained the first MCC-organised tour to Australia in 1903-04, regaining the Ashes 3-2 — England's first Ashes series win since 1896. Warner's selection was controversial (Archie MacLaren refused to tour because of it), but the campaign produced R.E. Foster's 287, Bosanquet's googly debut and Warner's own bestselling book 'How We Recovered The Ashes'.
Australia, England
1904-03-07
Hugh Trumble took 7 for 28 in his last Test innings, including a hat-trick of Bosanquet, Plum Warner and Dick Lilley, as Australia beat England by 218 runs at the MCG in March 1904. The hat-trick was Trumble's second in Tests (the first being against England at the same ground in 1902); he was the first man to take two Test hat-tricks. Australia won the dead rubber but lost the series 3-2.
England, Australia
1903-12-11
Reginald Erskine 'Tip' Foster scored 287 on Test debut at Sydney in December 1903, then the highest individual score in Test cricket. It remained a world record until 1930 and is still the highest score by any Test debutant. Foster's epic dragged England, captained by Plum Warner, from 73 for 3 to a first innings of 577 and the platform for an Ashes-winning campaign.
Australia, England
1903-12-17
Chasing 577 in the fourth innings after R.E. Foster's 287 had taken England to a giant total, Australia were 173 for 5 with the Test seemingly lost when Victor Trumper, on 0, was joined by Clem Hill. Trumper went on to 185 not out — his hundred coming in 94 minutes — but it was not enough: Australia, all out 485, lost the match by five wickets. The innings is often ranked alongside Trumper's Old Trafford 104.
MCC, Middlesex, England
1903-12-11
Pelham 'Plum' Warner, the Trinidad-born Oxford-educated Middlesex amateur, captained the first MCC team to tour Australia under the club's name in 1903-04 and won that series 3-2. The tour established the convention that English overseas tours were thereafter MCC enterprises rather than private commercial ventures, an institutional change in international cricket whose effects lasted until 1977.
Australia v England
1898-03-04
On 4 March 1898, in the dead-rubber Fifth Test at Sydney, Australia's South Australian opener Joe Darling reached his Test hundred in 91 minutes — at the time the fastest Test century in cricket. He went on to 160 in 165 minutes with 30 boundaries. By the end of the series Darling had become the first player to score 500 runs in an Ashes series and the first to score three hundreds in any series. Within fifteen months he was Australia's captain.