Dear Editor
A few days ago my friend, retired Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Slowe, sent me a terse WhatsApp message, “CC, Shane Warne died this morning.” News of this irreparable loss hit me like a bolt from the blue. I believe that all those who knew Shane Warne are equally perturbed. Shane Warne was my only non-West Indian cricketing hero. He had a horrible entry into Test cricket in India. After his first Test, on a spin friendly pitch, he had the staggering figures of 1 for 122. His victim was Ravi Shastri caught by Dean Jones for 206. The selectors subsequently dropped him from the Australian Test team. Recalled later, he ended his career with 708 test wickets, second only to Muttiah Muralitharan who captured 800. He took a hat trick against England. All three batsmen failed to score a single run. He bamboozled batsmen across the world with peerless bowling performances on all types of pitches. On the other side of things, he is the only batsman to score over 3000 test runs without recording a century. A world record. His highest score was 99 against England. He was one of the Wisden’s five Cricketers of the Century. All others were knighted. They are: Sir Garfield Sobers, Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Jack Hobbs and Sir Donald Bradman.
Shane Warne is remembered by millions of cricket fans for bowling the ball of the century, the ball from hell, the wonder ball or simply THE BALL. I watched it live on television. It was his first ball in a Test match against England at Old Trafford. England were chasing a small total and were coasting at 1 for 80. The batsman was Mike Gatting, a gritty, stocky, English – yeoman bloke who normally ate spinners for breakfast. Here is how Paul Barry in his book, “Spun Out Shane Warne – The authourized biography of a cricketing genius” described the delivery. “The bare facts about it are that at 3.06 pm on 4 June, 1993, a leg-break from Warne landed outside Gatting’s leg stump at Old Trafford and spun 60 centimeters or roughly two feet to the left, clipping the top of his off stump and removing the bail… looking back at the tapes, what immediately strikes you is how quickly the ball comes through and how slowly the batsman departs. The ball drifts, dips, spits off the pitch and wreaks its havoc in about the time it takes to blink twice.” England’s Ian Botham later quipped, “no one had seen Gatts looked so cross since the day someone stole his lunch.” Shane Warne took three more wickets in the innings.
England never got back into that test or into the series. England were scuttled out for 210. Another four more wickets in the match earned him the Man of the Match. In the next Test at Lord’s, he did it again, taking eight more wickets as Australia marched to an even bigger victory, after which England sacked seven players, including Gatting, and had to hold a cocktail party so that new players can get to know each other. Gooch resigned as captain after the fourth Test at Headingly when the Aussies were 3 – 0 up. Ted Dexter, Chairman of Selectors, fell on his sword at the end of the series, having used 24 different players in a desperate attempt to turn things around. At the end of the series, Warne’s tally was 34 wickets. According to Paul Barry, apart from Warne’s big leg-break, he had four other weapons in his bag of tricks: The flipper – the skidding backspinner that keeps low and stays straight; the zooter, which is a bit like a flipper that runs out of gas. It looks like a leg-break but floats from the front of the fingers with some backspin in it; next is the top spinner, which is bowled with over spin, not sidespin. It loops in the air, drops far shorter than the batsman expects and bounces high off the pitch without turning, and there is the ‘wrong un’. It spins from off to leg or right to left as you look at it from the batsman’s position. It is also called the googly. I may add that sledging was also part of his arsenal.
Apart from Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, very few batsmen could have played Shane Warne with any real authority. Lara and Warne had some epic battles on the field. When the West Indies played against Australia, in Australia, I used to wake my son, who was a school boy, to watch the encounters and at the end of the contest, send him back to sleep. However, I remembered one battle when I woke him, and before he could have settled in his chair, I had to send him back to bed. Shane Warne dismissed Brian Lara in two deliveries for a duck. The first ball was a bouncer which the umpire called a no ball. Lara hit the next delivery with the middle of the bat only to be brilliantly caught at extra cover. Warne had Lara out 7 times in 20 Test matches for an average of 55. Despite the ‘wars’ on the field of play, Brian and Shane developed and maintained a bromance relationship beyond the boundary until death took them apart.
The vexed question is, who was better spinner – Shane Warne or Muttiah Muralitharan? According to Brian Lara, he could read Shane Warne from ball one and play him with the middle of the bat. However, it takes him about forty five minutes to read Muralitharan. By that time, Muralie would lose confidence, which is when Shane Warne would gain confidence. He gave Shane Warne the edge. Interestingly, Shane Warne’s last ball was bowled against South Africa in Australia. It was not a big leg-break, it was not a flipper, it was not a zooter, it was not a top spinner, it was not the googly or ‘wrong un’. Guess what? Hold your breath. It was a bouncer. Shane Warne once said that his life was a Soap Opera. He lived that way until his death. If cricket is played in Heaven or Hell, there will be perpetual excitement on the field of play and beyond the boundary with Shane Keith Warne starring. May his soul rest in peace.
Sincerely,
Clinton Conway
Assistant Commissioner of Police
(Ret’d)