Rest in peace, Shane Warne

Headingly, July 22nd 1993 and the opening day of the fourth test that summer between England and Australia. This, as it happens, was my first time attending a test match. And although we – my father, brother and I – had travelled from Scotland to Leeds hoping to see England prevail against their oldest, greatest, rival, expectations were prudently low. Australia were, after all, already 2-0 ahead in the series and there was little sign England were capable – or even believed themselves capable – of hauling themselves back into contention.

There was the excitement of seeing test cricket in person. And, secondly, and more importantly, there was the prospect of seeing Shane Warne bowl. The 22 year-old Victorian was already a sensation. In the first three tests of the series, his leg-spin had taken 22 wickets. If he was not the only difference between the sides, he was the one player obviously operating on a different plane to everyone else.

Warne’s first test match delivery in England needs little further analysis. The so-called 'Ball of the Century' – drifting to leg, then veering left from a seemingly impossible angle to clip Mike Gatting’s off-stump, leaving the poor man bewildered and befuddled and the fall-guy trapped in some monstrous joke beyond his comprehension – has already become a delivery heard all around the cricketing world. This was something new; this was an intimation of a legend in the making.

Shane Warne’s death, apparently from a heart attack at the age of just 52, is the kind of shock which numbs the senses. So sudden and so much too soon that it risks seeming scarcely comprehensible. With apologies to Sri Lankan partisans for Muttiah Muralitharan, Warne was not only the greatest spin-bowler any of us have ever seen but quite plausibly the greatest bowler of any sort we have had the privilege to watch; the only bowler, indeed, chosen as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Twentieth Century.

The numbers – 708 test victims at an average of 25 – are impressive enough but they only really hint at the true extent of Warne’s genius. Spin-bowling is a kind of conjuring and no-one mastered the magician’s art more thoroughly than him.

Leg-spinners are rare. England, a land of penny-pinching sceptics when it comes to spin-bowling, has not produced a genuine leggie worth his place in the test side since before the second world war but they have been rare flowers too even in the lands where leg-spin has traditionally been considered something vital. Australia’s line of champions – Mailey, Grimmett, O’Reilly, Benaud – endured a lengthy winter before Warne’s arrival. The lights were kept on by the likes of Terry Jenner – Warne’s cricketing godparent – but it was a flickering light at best.

During the 1980s leg-spin could only really be found in Pakistan, where Abdul Qadir kept the faith alive. But Qadir’s spin didn’t travel overseas and this seemed to confirm that, in an age of West Indian pace, leg-spin was at best an indulgence, but more likely doomed. 

Warne, then, bloomed like a flower in a desert: rather, the Melbourne suburbs. Such were the hopes thrust upon any young leggie that he was picked for his Australian debut having played just seven first class matches. Nor was his start promising: Warne’s first 558 deliveries in test cricket brought one wicket at the cost of 346 runs.

But once the breakthrough came, the wickets never really stopped. With the exception of tests in India – a curious lacuna of the sort that cricket specialises in – Warne’s record everywhere he played is more or less impeccable. In England in particular he was supreme, taking 129 wickets at 22. The 2005 Ashes is rightly hailed as a series to be remembered for as long as the dear old game lasts but it is sometimes overlooked that Warne was most of what stood between Australia and oblivion. The visitors took 93 English wickets in that series and Warne accounted for 40 of them.

At the Oval that summer, England supporters enjoyed giving Warne the bird but it was sledging of an affable, even loving, kind. Even as the Ashes were on the brink of coming home for the first time in what felt like half a century, England supporters could serenade Warne with the words, 'Wish you were English, we only wish you were English'. That was a reminder that, even when pitted against Australia, cricket at its best is the least nationalistic of the great sports. Cardus’s prayer for an England victory accompanied by a century for Victor Trumper was the kind of pleading the almighty received on behalf of Shane Warne too.

To watch him bowl was to experience a kind of privilege; a gathering appreciation there was something unique and unrepeatable at play here. And, indeed, this has proved the case: leg-spin was saved and revived by Warne but not even he could wholly safeguard its future. Although increasingly vital in the abbreviated formats, leg-spin is once again a rare bird in test match cricket.

Batting is a mental business and the bowler’s task is to breach the batsman’s mental defences. The leg-spinner’s greatest weapon is doubt and no one cultivated that better than Warne. Before a new series he would confidently announce the development of a new and mysteries delivery of a kind the world had not yet seen. All balls, of course, but the seed of doubt was both point and proof of success.

Even in 1993, on his first tour of England, the sense of mystery and mystique was already present. Allan Border, the granite-tough Australian skipper and the man who more than anyone else saved Australian cricket in its hopeless 1980s, instructed Warne to hide all his variations in county fixtures prior to the first test. He wanted, and needed, Warne to be unknown.

Batsmen know they should play the ball, not the man but often it was the man who dismissed them. In that, Warne exercised some kind of hypnotic effect on batsmen that in modern Ashes cricket is only matched by Ian Botham’s ability to use a long-hop as a kind of siren luring Australian batsmen to their doom.

Leg-spinners are old-school but there were other ways in which Warne was a throwback. In a time of coaches he scoffed at their ability to much influence a team’s performance. Management-speak and motivational bullshit were an irrelevance. You can either play or you can’t.

And he was old-fashioned in other ways too. Warne’s creation myth – which sometimes ignores the two spells he had at the Australian national cricket academy – required him to be the simple larrikin from the ‘burbs, a young prodigy called up from somewhere which could have been anywhere to answer the nation’s call. That little in his past achievements could have pointed to his future accomplishments merely added to the sense of wonder. 

He liked a beer and a cigarette and a burger and a pizza and another beer and another cigarette and he’d never read a book. All he really knew was how to impart an astonishing amount of spin upon a cricket ball. 

But there was a fierce cricketing intelligence too. If his commentary in later years could sometimes grate, no one sensible ever doubted Warne’s appreciation for the game. Cricket found him, he liked to say, but he returned the favour in spades. He should have captained Australia and he jostles with Keith Miller for the title of Greatest Captain they never had.

For all sorts of reasons we are unlikely to see his like again. For one thing, Warne retired from limited overs cricket to prolong his test career. These days it would most likely be the other way round; players sacrifice test immortality for the fleeting riches of Twenty20. In that too, however, he was in his way a traditionalist and the celebrity and the run-ins with authority and all the tabloid nonsense that came with all of that should not obscure Warne’s craftsmanship and his respect for the game he bestrode.

One interviewer once came away from an encounter with Warne thinking it 'uncommonly easy to like him and a little harder to explain why' and that seems a fair judgement all these years later even if, perhaps unsurprisingly, this would not be a view shared by all his teammates. The purity of Warne’s relish for the game was, I think, a significant part of his appeal. Spin-bowlers are often considered odd but few have so thoroughly and publicly relished their role as the kidder’s kidder: 'You know that I know that you know that this is a bluff or a feint but we both know the death rattle’s coming'. The game was rarely dull when Warne was about.

Of course we never saw Warne, those first two days at Leeds. Australia won the toss and over 193 overs ground their way to 653/4 declared. If that was a salutary introduction to the realities of following England in person it was also, at the time, a significant disappointment. All these years later, it matters not. For Shane Warne gave us far more than we had any right or reason to expect. Few Australians have ever given so many people in this country so much pleasure. The best, simply the best.