He might have made scoring look easy on the Adelaide track by notching centuries in each innings, but David Warner said that the pitch is not placid anymore and his team is determined to take all 10 Indian wickets on the final day of first cricket Test on Saturday.
Warner scored 102 runs on the fourth day as the hosts took a 363-run lead after bowling India out for 444 in their first innings. Australia has declared their first innings at 517 for seven.
“At the moment it’s hard to score when the ball gets older. But there is a nice rough area for Nathan Lyon to exploit on last day,” said Warner.
“We saw that in first innings he pretty much hit it with every delivery. Tomorrow (on Saturday), we will try to take wickets with the new ball and once it gets older, we will try and use the conditions to reverse the ball,” he added.
Talking about Lyon, who took five for 134 in the India’s first innings, Warner said, “We have seen how much he has evolved in the last couple years. Now he has a fiver in first innings of a home Test. There is no reason why he can’t come out tomorrow with his tail up and help us take 10 wickets.”
“The pitch has changed and there are nearly 98 overs, there will be at least 10 chances for us to do that. When we went out to bat, we were only ahead by 70-odd runs and we had 70-80 overs remaining in the day. We batted normally first to set up the game and later Steve Smith and Mitchell Marsh came and hit the ball out of the park,” he explained.
Warner replicated his team-mate Phillip Hughes in scoring two hundreds in the same Test. The late batsman achieved that feat against South Africa in South Africa in March 2009.
“Yeah definitely, it was in the back of my mind as well. I have been seeing highlights of his back-to-back hundreds over the last week or so. Probably that gave me some luck out there today. It was a memorable thing to do. Phil had played fantastic knocks in South Africa,” said Warner.
The left-handed batsman said he is probably in the best form of his life at the moment.
“I think this is the best form of my life. I want to keep doing my job for the team and that is to score runs at the top. I would like to get big hundreds going forward and convert these hundreds to double hundreds like Michael Clarke did last time against India. That is the next goal. They are the achievements you want and they get recognised a lot,” said Warner, who got three lives during his knock.
The first one of them was perhaps the most prominent when he was bowled by Varun Aaron off a no-ball at 66. It started an intense exchange in the middle between the two, with Shane Watson, Shikhar Dhawan and Indian skipper Virat Kohli getting involved.
