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It was cricket nous that made Warne a spin legend

Mike Gatting was careless.

A ball pitched outside leg-stump can’t get you out LBW; so you can just cover the stumps with your pads and body, keeping your bat out of the way. Gatting thrust his left pad out casually as Shane Warne’s ‘ball of the century’ drifted out wide and dipped; then he missed the ball as it spun out of the rough to hit the top of his off-stump.

The England captain looked as startled back then at Old Trafford in 1993 as Virat Kohli did when left-arm spinner Lasith Embuldeniya spun one ball sharply on a docile Mohali track to hit the off stump, ending the former Indian captain’s innings in his 100th Test on Friday. Both batsmen, good players of spin, were done in by the unexpected. In pure cricketing terms, Embuldeniya’s ball was harder to negotiate, because it pitched on leg stump and had to be negotiated with the bat and not the pads and body.

But in terms of the occasion, Shane Warne was making his first appearance against arch-rivals England. Taking out the rival captain with a ball that turned 45 degrees psyched out the opponents. He went on to take 34 wickets in the Ashes series that the Aussies won 4-1, marking a shift in focus from pace-dominated games in the SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand, and Australia) countries. It also marked the start of a stellar run that made the Aussie leg-spinner the second highest wicket-taker in Tests in all time, with 708 wickets, averaging nearly five wickets a match, second only to Sri Lankan mystery spinner Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800 wickets averaging six wickets a match. Seen through that prism, you could justify the hyping of the Gatting dismissal as the ‘ball of the century.’ Warne himself called it “a bit of a fluke,” which was probably a characteristically honest assessment, although it was seen by most people as modesty.

Warne’s debut in Sydney against India in January 1992 gave no indication of his star turn later. He gave 150 runs in 45 overs for the solitary wicket of Ravi Shastri, after the Indian opener had made a double century. But he then worked with coach Terry Jenner, a former Australian leg-spinner, to figure out how to be more successful at the highest level of the game.

The first step was to lose 20 kg after Jenner told him, “You are fat, drink too much beer, smoke like a chimney, and have never had to sacrifice anything,” as Warne recalls in his book No Spin. Warne’s skillset revolved around a strong wrist to impart substantial turn even on wickets that were more conducive for fast bowling than spin. An easy run-up, which was mostly a brisk walk, allowed him to control line and length and develop a role in the Test team as a reliable foil for the pace bowlers, taking turns to bowl from the other end. He added variations to exploit the frailties of batsmen not used to playing a mix of leg-spin, top-spin, and googlies.

His deadliest weapon against English, Kiwi, and Protean batsmen was often the flipper, delivered at pace, short of a length. Batsmen would instinctively shape for a horizontal bat shot — a cut or a pull — and be bowled or get trapped LBW. His other ploy was to bowl wide into the rough and zap batsmen with prodigious turn, as he did to Gatting, or induce them into miscuing their shots for catches in the deep or edge the ball into slips.

While these ploys were highly effective against batsmen nurtured on pace, they could not produce similar results against those who were used to reading a spinner and handling turn. This explains why Warne had a bowling average of 47.19 against India, whereas over his career he conceded only 25 runs for every wicket he took. The starkest evidence of this dichotomy was in the 2001 Kolkata Test in which VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid batted through the entire fourth day, helping India to a historic win after being made to follow on. Warne gave 152 runs for the solitary wicket of opener Sadagoppan Ramesh in the Indian second innings, much like his Sydney debut. Contrast that with the 13 wickets Indian off-spinner Harbhajan Singh got in that match.

Warne lacked the deception to get the better of the likes of Dravid, Laxman, and Sachin Tendulkar. But he did have more success against others in the sub-continent, including Sri Lanka, where his rivalry with Muralitharan got highlighted.

The real limelight was on his exploits in the Trans-Tasman rivalry with New Zealand, the Ashes battles against England, and the tussle for supremacy in the southern hemisphere between Australia and South Africa. What stood out was his intelligence in reading batsmen and conditions, complementing his repertoire of bowling skills.

That’s why he was just as good a match-winner in limited overs cricket as he was in the long form. The high point of his one-day international career came in the 1999 World Cup in England, where his four top-order wickets for 29 runs in the semi-final helped Australia squeak through to the final after posting a below-par total of 213 in 50 overs against South Africa. He followed that up with a four for 33 to help Australia roll over Pakistan in the final.

Unfortunately, off-field scandals involving banned substances and lewd behaviour kept him out of the next World Cup and prevented him from captaining Australia, denying fans the joy of seeing the full scope of his cricketing brain at work.

Just how much was missed became apparent after his retirement from Tests, in the inaugural season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) T20 tournament in 2008. The Rajasthan Royals franchise spent only half as much as better-endowed corporation-owned franchises like Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings. But the franchise’s lead owner, Manoj Badale, came up with a masterstroke in recruiting Shane Warne as their advisor-cum-captain. Against all odds, with what looked like a rag-tag team on paper, Warne got the title for the Royals, beating Chennai Super Kings, led by India’s T20 World Cup-winning captain MS Dhoni, in the final.

It’s fitting that a young cricketer he dubbed a “rock star” in his team scored an unbeaten 175 and then took five wickets in the first innings of India’s Test match against Sri Lanka that began on March 4, the day of Warne’s untimely death at the age of 52. Ravindra Jadeja had just represented India in the under-19 World Cup that India won in 2008 when Warne took him under his wings. A leader is often defined by those he leads, and Warne had several fine examples in that Rajasthan Royals team. Jos Buttler and Shane Watson, who were in the doldrums until then, later became the leading match-winners for World Cup holders England and IPL champs Chennai Super Kings in later years.

Back in 2008, when T20 cricket was in its infancy, you wouldn’t think of opening the bowling with a part-time off-spinner. It took a Warne to transform Yusuf Pathan into an opening bowler and a hard-hitter with the bat. His cricketing nous was evident in his commentary and tweets too, and that is his true legacy as one of the greats of the game. That is also what the game and young cricketers lose with his passing.

Sumit Chakraberty is a writer based in Bengaluru. Write to him at chakraberty@gmail.com