Shane Warne: Wizard who made spin look cool

Occasionally, only very, very occasionally, the cricketing Gods conspire to bless the world with an extraordinary talent and immediately destroy the mould. This sensational mix of skill and a taste for drama is designed to excel, exhilarate and entertain. Shane Warne did all this and more during a most colourful two-decade-long career of dizzying heights and despairing lows.

The universal numbness at the news of the leg-spinning genius’ demise in a villa in Thailand on Friday of a suspected heart attack had only a little to do with the fact that he was but 52, too young to be gone, too young to be consigned to the pages of history. There was a general feeling of personal loss, of someone from the family passing away suddenly, dramatically, without pause or warning, leaving the world a poorer, less lustrous place.

Equal parts ability and theatre, Warne seemed to shatter television screens and pleasantly intrude one’s living room, coaxing and cajoling you into undertaking a journey of mesmeric, transcendental magic. The uninitiated enjoyed his command over his craft with as much delight and ecstasy as the well-informed and the connoisseur. Few sporting giants can claim to have achieved this so effortlessly.

Warne at his best was unplayable, a code impossible to crack, a mystery so profound and intricate that no solution seemed in sight. He was also irascible, naughty and impish. Perhaps this unusual mix of the surreal and the commonplace made him relatable. He was as human as the next bloke, never mind the otherworldliness of his cricket and especially of his leg-spin.

Quantifying Warne’s impact through numbers might appear trivial and insulting, but cricket more than any sport thrives on statistics. In time to come, when the Warne aura settles somewhat – don’t necessarily bet on it happening soon – history books will reveal that he ended his career with 708 Test wickets and 293 One-Day International scalps. They will inform that in all representative cricket, Warne bemused, befuddled and bamboozled 1,862 hapless victims, overpowering them as much with his stunning mix of ripping leg-breaks interspersed with hustling flippers and googlies as by the threat of unexplained new variations that he promised before the start of each marquee series.

Warne’s initiation into Test cricket was anything but promising. On debut at the spin-friendly SCG in early 1992, he finished with the unflattering figures of one for 150 as Ravi Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar took him to the cleaners. Shastri made the first, and to date, only double-hundred by an Indian opener in Australia before becoming Warne’s first Test victim and later predicted that despite the underwhelming returns, the leggie had a glorious future ahead of him. Others were less charitable, dissing him as more hype than skill, more style than substance, more bling and bluster and bravado than with a penchant for the hard yards and an uncompromising work ethic. It didn’t help that he lived up to his nickname of Hollywood. Overweight, with a diamond stud in one ear and a professed liking for the good things in life, Warne attracted his fair share of criticism though fortunately, the men who mattered saw beyond the flashy exterior and reposed faith in his clearly obvious gift.

His sense of theatre was never more apparent than on his first taste of the Ashes, in Manchester in 1993. By then, he had already bowled the Aussies to an unlikely win in Colombo, but nothing shakes a cricket-tragic out of his slumber than a slice of magic in an Ashes encounter. With his first ball in Tests on English soil, Warne made a statement worth more than a million words. Getting the ball to drift into the right-handed Mike Gatting, Warne got it to dip wickedly, turn right across the face of the bat and clatter into off-stump. Gatting, an excellent player of spin, looked pole-axed; you could have knocked him over with a feather. The legend of Warne was born, emphatically, inexorably.

For the next decade and a half, Warne continued to elicit gasps of awe and reverence, his easy run-up masking the terror he was to unleash with his strong figures and a magnificent wrist. Only the wonderfully skilled Indian batsmen had his measure. The others were serfs to his bidding, voluntarily walking to their doom, transfixed as they were by his larger-than-life persona.

Warne’s heroics in the semifinals and final of the 1999 World Cup in England were matched for impact only by his stunning exit in shame from the next edition in South Africa four years later when he tested positive for a diuretic which is also used as a masking agent. His assertion that he had taken the offensive substance at his mother’s urgings to lose weight hardly won him friends, nor did his various other dalliances that often flirted with and sometimes crossed the line of acceptability.

And yet, when he returned to the park with the ball as his willing ally, he made it appear as if all was well with the world. Even when it wasn’t. A wonderful student of the game, his leadership acumen was on full view even late in his career as he shepherded unfancied Rajasthan Royals to the inaugural IPL title in 2008.

Warne’s premature demise is another grim reminder of the unpredictability of life. It’s impossible to wrap one’s head around the fact that the man who embodied life and lived it to its fullest won’t entertain us any longer. RIP, Shane Warne, and thanks a bunch for the memories.

(R Kaushik is a Bengaluru-based senior sports journalist.)

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