David Warner has gone from being the pariah of the cricket world to winning the AB medal by one vote. I enjoy watching Warner play but I am for some reason biased against him which I cannot explain. I think that He is like Marmite (Vegemite to my Australian friends); you will either love him or hate him. I was surprised that Sandpapergate happened but not that David Warner was the epicentre of this incident which should never have happened. He had an extremely shabby Ashes but did well later especially in white-ball cricket.

This was not how I envisaged the first topic where I would use my Cricket Portfolio Index but it is for reasons like this why the I developed it. Allan Border has rightfully defended David Warner but has raised the topic of how the votes were calculated. Essentially after each match, the peers, media and umpires are given votes with a weight of 3:2:1. Smith has played one less match and eight fewer innings than Warner four of these have come in Test matches which makes me wonder whether Jofra Archer was the reason that Smith lost the AB medal. Those three innings would most probably have changed my results.

Numbers can be manipulated, massaged and misinterpreted but it can never lie. I have been focusing on Test Cricket because I do not have the time to enter the data manually for every game. I designed my index so that points in each format will be equivalent. This then raises the question of how to fairly treat all the formats of the game. My solution to this was to adopt a Time Weighted Performance to the game. I have taken a Test to be five days, an ODI to be one-fifth of a Test and T20 to be half a day. I churned the below results when I applied this theory.

David Warner has significantly outperformed Steven Smith when the performance across all formats are taken into consideration. Warner was absolutely destructive in the T20’s against Sri Lanka which ended up being the biggest contribution to the reason why he managed to beat Smith. Warner goes through cycles where he goes from being the bad boy to the good guy. I believe he is in the good guy cycle now and that is when he is the most dangerous because his focus is on beating the opposition with his own abilities rather than using sandpaper or jibes to wear down the opponent. People especially here in England have been shocked that he received the AB medal but the truth is that he deserves it because he played better and made up lost ground. This is not a story about a sentimental turn around by one person. It is the tale of one man who overcame challenges after failing at the Ashes.