David Warner wants to go out a hero. But will he? Even in Sydney, his hometown, this week?

Many have still not forgiven him for bringing cricket to its knees in Cape Town in 2018.

They were unimpressed by his understated, underwhelming apologies afterwards.

As I fulfill Christmas/New Year media commitments around the publication of David Warner, The Bull, daring to be different, it’s clear that many remain permanently scarred by the biggest Australian cricket headliner since Shane Warne.

Unlike Warnie who kept on putting his foot in it big time but kept smiling, apologising and appealing to the Australian public to accept his foibles, Warner has never had the same charisma – or public rapport.

He’s street smart but his apologies have been lame.

Will he address the old issues pre-Sydney? Probably not.

His way as his first state captain Dominic Thornely says in The Bull is to let his bat do the talking.

At the time of cricket’s greatest scandal, one of the Cricket Australia sponsors rang chief executive James Sutherland saying that the year bans were too lenient. He wanted them all to be banned for life and when they didn’t, he withdrew his company’s six million sponsorship.

One silly, insanely stupid act created chaos – with  resignations everywhere – and it’s one of the reasons why this latest book of mine is in such summertime demand.. and has been reprinted.

I take you behind the scenes and share with the readers exactly what happened. And how ‘Captain Calamity’ Steve Smith told Warner: ‘I don’t want to know anything about it.’

Like Greg Chappell with the underarm all those years back, Smith wasn’t fit to be Australia’s captain.

Had then-coach Darren Lehmann known about the plan, he would have stopped it, there and then. He’s too good a cricket person to have condoned it.

Despite a Test average of just 22 leading into the Pakistani Tests, Warner’s World Cup doings  were enough to see him selected again for a farewell summer.

I for one hoped he would be an automatic selection for the summer’s two holiday Tests from Boxing Day.

There has been no finer multi-format player in Australian cricket. Or one as provocative or as polarising.

Whichever camp you sit in, no-one can deny his amazing impact as one of the champion cricketers of his times.