Shane Warne: The spin is gone

Senior journalist Sharda Ugra writes on the untimely and sudden passing away of Australian cricket legend Shane Warne.

There must be some way to process the inexplicably gut-wrenching departure of Shane Warne, and so first you try place yourself as a fielder. As it’s Warne, there is variety, always multiple options. Should you be at forward short leg? Under the helmet, heart racing, as he appears in your peripheral vision, a whirlwind of mischievous intention and fiendish wizardly. The crowd is at the edge of its seats, something is definitely going to happen, and bat-pad had better be ready.

Shane Warne appealing for a wicket.

Warne approached the crease like a sixth sense. The arm wheeling over at the rate of knots, the ball leaving the hand, invention and discovery packed together in its ripping flight path. The langourous drift, the deathly dip, the spiteful, malevolent, corkscrew turn, seeking and finding. Either the edge of a blade that slits the batsman’s throat or tipping bails, falling over themselves, chortling like noisy schoolboys.

Or maybe you should not be so close because you will virtually find yourself in the intoxicating, gravity of his craft, which from older age was given “Warnie’s” own modern jazz riff. Maybe it is better to be at a distance, maybe at short fine or deep mid-wicket, waiting for the batsman’s panic-striken hoick. Standing back helps you examine this astonishing, compellingly larger-than-life cricketer through comprehensible scale against the vast canvas of the game.

Even then, you realise, against that landscape, with 150 years behind us, Shane Warne cannot be packed into modest proportion, because he’s one of those at the head of the entire pack. On the Knights Exemplar side of the Round Table, if you like, exchanging notes with Garry Sobers or challenging the Don to an over in the nets anywhere. Naturally, he would feature in any cricketing pantheon but it’s more important to realise that if cricket featured in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Shane Warne would be an essential part of its entry. That’s what his cricket and his personality were in the game – galactic.

When the great ones go, in its struggle to cope, cricket pays tribute first through their cricketing credentials, their numbers, and a recounting of skills and stories. It is necessary, contextual, professional. But those like Warne, are so distinctive, that they cannot be compartmentalised. He was to become Mr Leg Spin, the walking-talking-slow-motion-explainer of an arcane previously inexplicably skill, which he turned into a new millennium match-winning mantra. If you were that good, of course.

His career ran parallel in the 1990s with the mushrooming of satellite television and sports broadcasting gizmos around the cricketing world. Inside it, strode Warne, slow bowler with the fast bowler personality, the captain Australian cricket didn’t enlist because of a colourful, chatterbox personality, a ’90s cricketing superstar of 1970s chunkiness, thriving in age of fitness training, bleep tests and body fat percentages.

While Warne’s Ashes success was to catapult him into superstardom, complete with his baked-beans-on-tour persona, he was to rise above easy caricature because of his cricketing evolution and on-field success. He has a thousand-plus wickets for his country, he was a key component of an Australian team which was one of cricket history’s two all-time great teams. That he chose to wear those achievements like a neckerchief rather than a cravat tells you just who he was.

Whatever else he appeared to be to the outside world, Warne was always a cricketer’s cricketer, an eager student/teacher/talker of the game. The advent of T20 was a particular delight to him and he was to dive into the IPL as the captain who made Rajasthan Royals the IPL’s first champions on the back of its first “Moneyball” team. Who are the most-sought-after bowlers in T20 franchise cricket alongside left-arm quicks? Leggies. Warnie showed us what leg-spin could do.

Everyone’s personal favourite highlights from their Shane Warne memories album could feature any of his many balls of the century or his final over whisperings to the keeper setting batsmen’s minds a-panic or his wild yodel-of-an-appeal.

I remember him as clear as yesterday, a few minutes before start of play on Day 5 of the Chennai Test of 2001. He was standing outside the Australian team’s Chepauk dressing room. His teammates are around him, chattering; Warne remains quiet, hair mussed up, whites clean but crumpled, smoking a cigarette, his eyes on the field. The hunter sizing up the day ahead of him and how the prey could be stalked and brought down. After the umpires stepped into the field, he takes one last puff, tosses aside the cigarette, stamps on it and crosses the rope. He came close but when the day didn’t end his way, he just shrugged and shook hands.

Over these last two years, Covid has robbed sport and us day after day, but it has been nothing like today. Two of the most irrepressible – the other Rodney Marsh – are gone within hours of each other. And not just Australia, cricket itself is dealing with a silence turned as voiceless as a shroud.

Shane Warne, so much left unsaid, gone too soon.