From Ferntree Gully to Mumbai, Shane Warne's life has been somewhat out of the ordinary. In England, cricket is not a sport normally associated with big characters and sporting role-models. In Australia, things are different although Warne only turned to cricket having been rejected by his Aussie Rules club back in the late 1980s. I wonder how not only the Victorian superstar but also cricket itself would look today had he followed his dream with a much bigger ball and tighter shorts!
Aged 41, he has said the Rajasthan Royals' final game of IPL 2011 was definitely his swansong. Will he be lured back or will he do a Botham and be true to his word despite all the inducements? I somehow reckon he'll stick to his guns. After all he has such a fabulous career on which to look back. 1,851 wickets, almost 9000 runs and more than 400 catches tell only half the story. If you go by stats alone, he is not the best bowler of his generation, let alone deserving of the accolade of one of the five Cricketers of the Century. After all, in modern times, the likes of Muralitharan, Marshall, McGrath, even Shane Bond, have boasted a superior Test bowling average, but while Murali went on to claim many more wickets in all forms of cricket, most commentators and fans would still place SKW at the top of the tree.
I suppose I first discovered him like most other Brits, when he bamboozled Mike Gatting at Old Trafford on 4th June 1993 with such an outrageously turning leg break that the England number three seemed to take ages deciding whether to appeal against the decision on the basis that the laws of physics made it impossible and the stumps must have been clattered not by the ball but 'keeper Ian Healy. He took eight wickets in that Test and continued to frustrate and bewilder English batsmen for a further 13 years. He played his best in Ashes games, but he wasn't uniformly successful against all nations. For instance, he has a very mediocre record in India and the West Indies. For all his brilliance in recent IPLs, he isn't even the most successful or economical bowler for the Royals. He isn't even the best player called Shane to have represented the Royals! However, Warne is simply one of the most remarkable characters cricket has produced in my lifetime.
I certainly don't approve of everything he has done, especially off the pitch, but he really did single-handedly change the course of international cricket in the early '90s. After three decades when batsmen and fast bowlers were the biggest names in the game (maybe excepting in India), Shane made slow bowling 'cool' and revived the almost extinct art of leg-spin. No wonder Gatting looked so mesmerised that afternoon; he'd probably never faced a genuine leg-break before. Warne could be a bit of a bad boy but he was always generous and gracious to fellow sportsmen, despite the Aussies' tendency to sledge and grind opposition into submission. He and Murali swapped world records regularly in the last decade but both had enormous respect for each other, and that, in my book, is important.
When I saw him on TV playing for Rajasthan this Spring, I did scratch my head and wonder whether whether the Shane Warne filmed under the floodlights was the same Shane Warne I'd watched many times over the previous two decades. He seemed somehow younger, and, oh, those dazzling teeth! No, Shane, that just isn't you! You are supposed to be a bloke's bloke, not swan around with a celeb girlfriend!
I only saw him bowl two overs at first hand, and they were just to fill in time before an interval and give McGrath a rest amidst his 8-38 at Lord's in '97. However, my lasting memory of Warne was in the portrait which I recall hanging in the Long Room at Lord's. He's captured with trademark tousled blonde quiff, lopsided cheeky grin, nonchalantly flicking a ball in the air and for me that was Shane Warne. A bit naughty but nice, the master of his art and superb cricketer, simply one of the bast there has ever been. He will be missed.
