Jonny Bairstow insists IPL friendship with David Warner will be forgotten once the Ashes starts
Jonny Bairstow’s Indian Premier League friendship with David Warner will be forgotten once the Ashes start this week.
Bairstow was sledged mercilessly on the last Ashes tour by Warner and ended up the centre of a media storm when his friendly “headbutt” with Cameron Bancroft was made public during the first Test in Brisbane.
Warner and Bairstow played together for the Sunrisers in the IPL earlier this year, opening the batting together and forming a strong partnership.
Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft are back in the Australia side this week but the ball-tampering scandal, and the subsequent fallout, has made it highly unlikely there will be a repeat of some of the ugly on-field behaviour that marred the last Ashes series in Australia.
“I’ve spoken about batting with Dave a few times. It’s still England v Australia. Part and parcel of franchise cricket around the world – you’ll play with people, it’s something you get used to doing. He’ll be wanting to win for Australia, I want to win for England, but we’ll still shake hands off the field. Know what I mean?,” said Bairstow.
“A lot of cricket and a lot of things have happened since Brisbane. It’s so long ago. They will be looking to target people, of course they will. They will be looking for areas in people’s games – like we analyse them. It is part of professional sport.”
The Ashes phoney war has been low key this time around, mainly because the World Cup has dominated the build-up to the series. However, Josh Hazlewood tried to reprise the role of Glenn McGrath by gently baiting England batsmen at the weekend when he said Jason Roy would find transferring one-day batting to Test cricket very difficult. He cited the example of Aaron Finch, the Australia one-day captain who was picked for Test cricket last winter but failed to make the step up.
Roy told TalkSport: “They can say what they want. He said Test cricket is hard and he’s right, that’s just stating the obvious. If he has said that I won’t succeed in Test cricket then that’s a little bit harsh. But they’re under a lot of pressure, he’s played a lot of Test cricket and I haven’t, so we’ll see in a few days.”
Jonny Bairstow trained with the Birmingham Vision partially sighted cricket team before the Specsavers Ashes series opener at Edgbaston
