Cricket: Sorry, David Warner and Elysse Perry gender conspiracy is fake news

Twitter sleuths thought they'd exposed a David Warner conspiracy. They were wrong. Photo / Twitter

COMMENT:

It must be fun getting to be so popular on Twitter without actually having to be right.

The usual crew thought they'd uncovered a dastardly attempt by The Australian to make David Warner appear taller than Ellyse Perry after Monday night's Australian Cricket Awards, posting photographs to prove Little Davey was in fact looking up to his female counterpart.

And as these things go, everyone believed it. Case closed. A chauvinistic editor had decided there was no way they could publish an image of a woman towering over a man and had an artist doctor the shot.

THE AUSTRALIAN FIXED THE PROPER ORDER OF THINGS, MAN TOWERING OVER WOMAN, VERY GOOD https://t.co/IvBGb74AxX

— Jess McGuire (@jessmcguire) February 11, 2020

But in their rush to be clever and start counting the likes, the social sleuths missed the mark.

Anyone with a basic understanding of newspaper deadlines would have understood how the switch occurred.

A closer inspection of the front page pointer revealed the photographs used were from the red carpet, earlier in the night before Warner and Perry had been named the best male and female cricketers in the country.

Why were those images used instead of the photographs of the two together? Deadlines.

The newspaper was given the result of both medal counts in advance so it could get its pages to the printer in time.

At that time, the artist only had a select group of images taken as the players entered Crown Palladium in Melbourne — and surprise surprise Warner walked in with his wife, Candice, while Perry arrived solo.

When deciding how to arrange the two separate photographs, the artist would have placed Perry in front of Warner because he could etch cleanly around her shoulders. Warner's left side was pressed up against his wife, so he was placed behind Perry.

And the decision on how tall to make him? It likely wasn't a decision at all.

Maybe the artist just felt like it looked better with the person on the left being slightly elevated. Just like the day before when 160cm Scarlett Johansson was made to look taller than 170cm Al Pacino (and no one got upset).

So sorry angry Twitter mob. There's no conspiracy here, just more fake news.