How good was Shane Warne? Put it this way: when Wisden asked 100 experts around the globe to choose their Five Cricketers of the Century for its millennium edition, only one contemporary player made the cut.
Shane Keith Warne. Curious how three simple syllables conveyed, for batsmen everywhere, an incomprehensible world of pain.
Don Bradman, of course, ran away with the Wisden vote, picking up a clean-sweep 100. Garry Sobers was next, on 90. There was a huge gap to third: England’s batting master Jack Hobbs, on 30. Fourth, on 27 – two ahead of Viv Richards – was Warne. His Test career was barely half done.
The legendary leg-spinner took 708 wickets in his 145 Tests in a legendary career
Among those still playing, Sachin Tendulkar was next, way behind in joint-17th, with six votes. Wasim Akram collected three, Curtly Ambrose and Allan Donald one each. Only Warne was up there with the immortals, sainted before his time, a genius who flirted with miracles.
He was never a statty kind of guy, but then he didn’t need to be: the wickets appeared to generate themselves, like interest accruing unnoticed in a billionaire’s bank account.
His Test haul of 708 was surpassed only by Sri Lanka’s equally freakish spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, though the debate about who was the greater would often end when anyone cited their respective wicket tallies against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe: Warne 17, Murali 176.
On top of that, Warne hoovered up 293 in one-day internationals. That’s 1,001 wickets for Australia, all told (perhaps he did keep an eye on the numbers). He could probably name each of his victims, and how he set him up. There would be embellishment, but that was part of the act. As well as anyone in cricket’s history, he understood how much of the game is played in the mind.
The legendary leg-spinner was England’s chief tormentor throughout several Ashes series
South Africa’s Daryll Cullinan was said to have spoken to a therapist in his bid to deal with Warne’s leg-breaks, googlies, flippers, sliders and zooters – or whatever fresh delivery he claimed to have invented, usually on the eve of the Ashes. When the pair next met, Warne asked Cullinan about the colour of the couch.
Above all, he had an impresario’s knack for the box-office. It wasn’t enough that he spent nearly 14 years tormenting England, picking up 195 Ashes wickets alone – a Test record for one player against one team. No, he first had to announce himself with his Ball of the Century to Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993, a delivery that defied physics and implanted in a generation of English batsmen a neurosis they rarely overcame.
Even when he ended up on the losing side in the Ashes, in 2005, Warne was by a distance the leading wicket-taker. As the urn slipped from Australia’s grasp at The Oval 17 years ago, sections of the crowd chanted in Warne’s general direction: ‘We bet you wish you were English!’
Bet he didn’t. Because if he had been, he would have been dumped for being different. For one thing, he was overweight (he loved a pineapple pizza), his hair was bleach-blond, his ear graced by a stud. The stewards at Lord’s would have slammed shut the Grace Gates.
Warne was crucial to Australia’s domination at Test level in the 1990s and 2000s
It’s possible not even his own compatriots believed in him at first. Walking out for his Test debut against India at Sydney in January 1992, Warne was urged by Australia’s captain Allan Border not to ‘do a Johnny Watkins on us’ – a reference to another Aussie leg-spinner whose nerves had got the better of him on his only Test appearance two decades earlier. Warne finished with figures of one for 150.
By the time Australia were trying to defend a target of 181 against Sri Lanka in Colombo later that year, his Test bowling average had ballooned to 335. It’s possible he was one bad spell away from drifting into obscurity. But he picked up three for 11, and Sri Lanka – having been 127 for two – were knocked over for 164. Warne never looked back.
He did more, though, than help turn Australia into one of the great Test teams. By breathing fresh life into a dying art, he did all of cricket a favour.
West Indies had spent the previous decade terrorising batsmen with pace, and others had tried to follow suit. Machismo was in the air. Now Warne – along with Muralitharan and India’s Anil Kumble – ushered in a golden age of slow bowling. It was gentler, but in its own way just as lethal.
Leg-spin is the hardest of all cricket’s skills, yet the simplicity of Warne’s routine appeared to invite imitation, and youngsters everywhere tried to copy him.
Warne was up there with immortals Don Bradman (left) and Garry Sobers (right)
The Pinteresque pause at the top of his mark. The stroll to the crease, casual yet ominous. The muscular rotation of the shoulder, the magical flick of the wrist. The oohs and aahs, whether a batsman had edged it or missed it or middled it or even hit it out of the ground.
Goodness knows how many wickets he would have taken with the help of the Decision Review System, or how many he would have had chalked off. Umpires, as well as batsmen, fell under his spell.
His legend grew in part because his cricketing feats often ran parallel to the soap opera of his real life. He had a brush with ‘John the bookmaker’, the shadowy figure said to be involved with illegal betting in the subcontinent, and got into trouble for sending lewd text messages. He missed a World Cup after taking a banned substance, and dated Liz Hurley.
Had he been more of a model citizen, he would have captained Australia in more than 11 one-day internationals.
But then neither would he have been Shane Warne – the Melbourne beach bum made good, the gambler with the twinkle in his eye, the rogue, the showman, the magician. The cricketer who one moment held the ball in the palm of his hand, and the next the entire game.
Bowled, Shane.
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