David Warner Out to a Joke Shot but he Could well have the last laugh

For David Warner the past few months in international cricket have been all about abstinence, paring back, a kind of mid-career detox. First to go was the old abrasive evil-cartoon-puppy persona. Warner was nobody's enforcer, he announced abruptly during an interview in the West Indies. (Aussies ride twin tons)

There would be no more boorishness-to-order. New mature Dave would be keeping his counsel. All of which was apparently news to Warner's own team-mates, who had simply been wondering why their star opener wasn't talking much in training. (Steve Smith taunts Alastair Cook)

Next to go was alcohol. Warner has gone teetotal for the current Ashes tour, an unremarkable enough decision for any professional sportsman - unless, of course, your most notable act to date in England has been whisking the comedy beard from Joe Root's chin while under the influence of too many white wine spritzers. (Rogers creates Lord's history)

Some things remain, however. At midday on the first morning at Lord's as the ball swirled high in the air above a jitterbugging Jimmy Anderson at long-on, before finally being caught with misleading ease, it was tempting to draw up a list of things Warner hasn't got round to giving up yet.

Playing doomed, macho, statement-shots an hour into the day on a flat pitch when your captain has just elected to bat, for example. Getting caught up in the moment, when Test cricket isn't a game of moments but a more glacial process of accumulated credit, asserting, steadily, then in incremental bounds, your own decisive rhythms.

Oh, Dave. It was, as ever, a brilliantly entertaining turn. On a day of assertive, increasingly regal first-innings accumulation led by Chris Rogers, on his home from home, and Steve Smith, batting here like the right-handed princeling of the past two years, Warner did at least provide the only moment of light relief for the English spectating public.

Australia were 68 for nought off 14 overs and rollicking along like a runaway milk cart when Moeen Ali came on to bowl his first over just after the first drinks break. For Warner it had been another slightly jumpy morning, a mix of compact defence, pedigree clumps to the fence and those darty little fresh-air jabs outside off-stump.

At the end of which Australia's high-spec opening batsman had the appearance once again of a man batting with the handbrake on, V6 engine thrumming, wheels smoking, spurting and stuttering around the St John's Wood roundabout without ever making his mind up which exit to take.

The sight of Moeen seemed to settle things in Warner's mind. Although there is perhaps some evidence here of a mild case of pogonophobia. Certainly there seems to be something about Warner and beards. The first glimpse of one: he goes berserk. Here Moeen's first two balls disappeared for a pair of muscle-cricket thumps down the ground.

Warner was revving, he was thrumming, he was practically salivating. Unfortunately he was also out straight away, throwing his hands at the ball like a drunken lord thrashing about on the camomile lawn and spooning that catch to Anderson.

Warner walked off, shoulders slumped, having contributed what was immediately portrayed on social media as a contender for most blockheaded shot of the summer, a moment so sweet for many England fans the only real regret was he could only do it once.

Warner had gone out to make a statement. And that statement was: I still can't bat in England. Warner had talked before this series about "turning hundreds into big hundreds". Here at least he'd turned a 30 into a big thirty. Warner, who'd spent 24 balls getting to six and then 18 making his next 32, had confirmed what so many suspected, that he simply can't play the longer, harder game on slower harder pitches. And so on ad unfunny infinitum. New, ascetic Dave had passed.

For all that the urge to mock - not to mention to Vine and meme and generally snark - should be reined in a little. As kind of formal experiment, hybrid spawn of Twenty20, Warner will always attract sweeping judgments. He remains a bizarrely political figure, emblem of some wider cricketing battle between the old, drowned world of austere five-day craft and the new forms and audiences of cricket's zesty new frontier.

And yet from at least one angle his dismissal here, if not the execution of that spooned drive, made perfect tactical sense. England talk the talk, but Warner got there first, a one-man embodiment of that relentlessly trumpeted New Brand of Cricket.

He is above all a thrillingly murderous striker of a cricket ball, as he showed punishing some loose stuff from Mark Wood, his best shot the short-arm punch through cover that left his bat with a thunderous, entirely uncricket-like sound, more a boom than a crack, as though somebody had thrown a solid mahogany baby grand piano out of one of the windows in the members' enclosure.

Perhaps some will see a kind of reproach in the way Rogers and Smith set about England's attack with a measured, high-class severity after lunch.

On a pitch that offered little for England's attack the remaining members of Australia's top three scored high-class hundreds, with Smith in particular revealing a lovely velvety quality to his stroke-play.

Although England can at least console themselves Australia's No3 will be extra tired this evening having walked at least half a mile taking that pointed little step across his stumps before every ball.

By the end Warner's moment of unintentional comedy looked like no more than a footnote on the day, just another minor snag in his own knotty personal relationship with playing Test cricket in the northern hemisphere.

And yet, the suspicion remains he might just have the last laugh on this one. Warner is simply too pure a talent not to come good at some point. This was a dream of an opening day for Australia on a pitch that will quicken up.

They have runs in the bank and a world No1 batsman in the series. For all the social media jollity, the diminished returns of Australia's newly tethered attack dog, somewhere between Lord's and the Oval they might just have the best of Warner to come.