David Warner

David Warner's extraordinary batting feats in all three formats for Australia will forever be overshadowed by his role as the chief protagonist of the Newlands ball-tampering scandal of 2018 and his place as a central figure in Australian cricket's ensuing cultural crisis.

After he was charged as the man who instructed team-mate Cameron Bancroft to use sandpaper on the ball in the infamous Cape Town Test, Warner, though not punished by the ICC, was banned from international and Australian domestic cricket by Cricket Australia for 12 months, stripped of the vice-captaincy, and banned from leadership roles for life.

He returned for the 2019 World Cup and enjoyed a prolific tournament before suffering a record-breakingly poor Ashes, in which he made 95 runs in ten innings. He bounced back later that year with an unbeaten 335 against Pakistan in Adelaide - the second-highest Test score by an Australian - during a home summer in which he received the Allan Border Medal.

Prior to his ban, Warner had established himself as one of the best all-format openers in the world. In 2015 his seniority was recognised when he was named vice-captain to Steven Smith in the Test and ODI sides, and he led the limited-overs sides with great success when Smith was rested. It was quite a turnaround for the man who two years earlier had been suspended by Cricket Australia for punching England's Joe Root in a bar-room altercation in Birmingham, and had been warned over a Twitter spat with a pair of journalists. It completed a remarkable rise for a player who burst onto the international scene in 2008-09 as a T20 specialist - he was the first man since 1877 to debut for Australia before playing first-class cricket. His breathtaking 89 from 43 balls on T20I debut against South Africa told the world of his talent, but few at the time expected him to become a key Test player as well.

His debut in the baggy green came, appropriately, in Test match No. 2020, against New Zealand at the Gabba in 2011, and in his second game he achieved what Justin Langer and Matthew Hayden never did, carrying his bat through a Test innings. His unbeaten 123 in Hobart could not prevent a historic New Zealand win, but his patience in challenging conditions showed a different side to his batting.

Later that same summer he made a very different kind of hundred, a 69-ball one against India at the WACA. In the seven-year period between his debut and the ban, Warner was far and away the best Test opener in the world.

Away from international cricket, he has had a prolific franchise T20 career, especially in the IPL, and in 2021 became just the fourth batter to pass 10,000 runs in T20.