In the few weeks im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter he was banned for his role in the ball tam­per­ing scan­dal dur­ing Aus­tralia's Test against South Africa in Cape Town last year, David Warn­er felt like not even get­ting off the bed.

Wednes­day, how­ev­er, he felt like he was back on top of the world af­ter scor­ing his first hun­dred for the Aussies in two years, al­so at a World Cup. The left-han­der scored 107 as Aus­tralia de­feat­ed Pak­istan by 41 runs in their ICC World Cup en­counter at the Coun­ty Ground at Taunton.

He was full of praise for his wife Can­dice af­ter his match-win­ning in­nings.

“I was al­ways com­ing back to in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et if se­lect­ed. The thing that kept me go­ing was my wife and two young kids. I got great sup­port at home from the fam­i­ly. My wife at home, she’s been my rock - she’s un­be­liev­able, dis­ci­plined, self­less," Warn­er said.

“I hold a lot of cred­it to her, she’s a strong woman. She got me out of bed a lot in those first 12 weeks and got me back run­ning and train­ing as hard as I could. Just to main­tain my lev­el of fit­ness and hard work, she nailed that in­to me."

Warn­er ad­mit­ted, how­ev­er, that he was wor­ried he might have not got­ten an­oth­er hun­dred for his coun­try.

“Yes, def­i­nite­ly, there was al­ways that go­ing through my mind,” nod­ded the left-han­der when asked about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that his hun­dred in the Box­ing Day Test against Eng­land in De­cem­ber 2017 might have been his last in the bag­gy green.

“That’s what drove me to keep be­ing as fit as I can, to keep scor­ing as many runs as I can in the Twen­ty20 tour­na­ments I played in, and re­al­ly en­joy play­ing in grade crick­et.

“I think to go through these tough times and re­group­ing put my­self in the best way to come back in­to in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et. Per­son­al­ly, of course, it’s a great thing to get this hun­dred. Ob­vi­ous­ly, it’s been a long time com­ing.”