AN INDELIBLE MARK: SHANE WARNE: 1969 - 2022

question of how he managed to improve so dramatically from that underwhelming first appearance. All cricketers who graduate from first class cricket into the Test arena face a dramatic change where they either sink or swim. In cricket, county cricket stars like Graeme Hick or Mark Ramprakash never quite found greatness, though you would have assumed from their records before playing Test cricket that they’d have easily made the transition.

BY CHRISTOPHER JACKSON

On 4th March 2022, Shane Warne, the greatest bowler of all time, told his 3 million Twitter followers:‘Sad to hear the news that Rod Marsh has passed. He was a legend of our great game & an inspiration to so many young boys & girls. Rod cared deeply about cricket & gave so much – especially to Australia & England players. Sending lots & lots of love to Ros & the family. RIP mate’

Incomprehensibly, today those words apply to him – though he is six or seven items down the news due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Warne deserves far more than to be a footnote on a day of conflict: he belongs instead to that superior condition of peace. He chose to use all his talent and ingenuity towards entertaining us and making us happier. Sometimes, when someone dies, you will hear that they were ‘one of the greats’ but Warne was something else: he was the greatest. Muttiah Murilitharan – his only serious rival in the Test arenamight have more wickets, but Warne’s stature was of another kind. When Warne came along, the very notion of leg spin was more or less deemed to be antiquated. The 1980s had been notable mainly as a period of West

Indian fast bowling – a time of rangy giants approaching the wicket to unleash unplayable deliveries at 90 mph plus.

They were very unlike Warne, with his fluctuating weight and cheeky guile.

As if to prove these fears, Warne’s first test match figures were a disappointment:

1-150 against India at Sydney. But in time he would prosper – and then to his own surprise outstrip all his competitors.

He once said that 400 wickets was 400 than he thought he would get. By the time he got to 708 he said: “Look, that’s a hell of a lot of wickets.”

Furthermore, has there ever been someone who left a discipline so absolutely unlike the condition he found it in? One has to think of Federer in tennis, reintroducing guile to a sport which had been dominated by big servers. If you rewatch the so-called Ball of the Century with the original commentary, then you can hear how the commentator doesn’t initially know that the batsman has been bowled: Mike Gatting wasn’t the only one taken by surprise by Warne.

The case of Warne also raises the

It is in the mind – as it is with all careers. My sense is that some people come into a right sense of time – of how small the window is to succeed or fail. They realise that it’s now or never – and rather than finding that a stressful or depressing thought find it a motivating or even unburdening one, and then proceed to capitalise. It increases their sense of controlled gamble and they never look back. This is what I think happened to Warne: he fed at the right time off the right energy within himself.

To those who lived through it, 2005 will always be the golden summer for cricket. It cannot be separated out from Warne as a cricketer and a person, though Freddie Flintoff played a similarly important role for England. I will never forget the way Warne was bigger somehow even that the defeat Australia suffered at the Oval, bowling his heart out – and looking like he was enjoying himself immensely even as the odds grew harder. He seemed to love bowling particularly against Kevin Pietersen; like all the best, he wanted to play against the best.

Warne loved playing in England, and relished the ribbing nature of the rivalry. Notice in the Rod Marsh tweet at the top of this article how casually England is snuck in alongside Australia in his sentiments. There is an unconscious Anglophilia there which will be missed.

Humour had its role in Warne’s life too. During one Ashes series, Ian Bell –who has tweeted a moving tribute this afternoon – was labelled by Warne the Sherminator because of his resemblance to a character in the film American Pie. On another occasion when Bell was sledging Warne when Warne when he was at the crease, he looked at Bell in the slips and retorted magnificently:

“You mate, are making me concentrate.” He went on to score his highest Test innings. It was a taunt by someone who knew his greatness; Test Match cricket had become a playground for him.

People will say he was flawed, and of course he was – but grandly so. This love of life made him inclusive and infectious: by the end of his relatively short life he was loved as much as he was revered, both in Australia and

England. From the outside looking in, he seems to have had a rocky emotional life but this was balanced, if the tributes from all over the world are anything to go by, by a capacity for friendship. There is a sense of great loss today which can only be countered by the old unattributed remark: “Is there cricket in heaven? Of course there is. It wouldn’t be heaven without it, would it?” If that’s the case then perhaps we might imagine Warne running into bowl. Donald Bradman is at the crease; Jack Hobbs is at the other end. Gary Sobers is keeping wicket.

What kind of God would go around creating a universe without letting that happen? As the umpire says at the start of each match: play.