The fat jokes are flying at the moment, but tubby or not Shane Warne remains capable of destroying South Africa’s hopes of a Test series victory in Australia. Robert Winder reports
The first thing you notice about Shane Warne, Australia’s celebrated leg-spinner, is that he looks like a bleached koala bear. Chubby, round shouldered and with clownish dobs of white suncream on his nose and lips, he could hardly look less like the model of a modern major athlete.
His bowling action is a joke: he doesn’t bother to run up, he just strolls up to the stumps like some bored dad at the seaside. You half expect to see him lick an ice-cream on the way, stick a panama hat on his head, and loop the ball underarm. Instead, he clenches his teeth, throws those soft-looking arms high over his shoulders, crunches his wrists over the ball with a now-familiar snap, and gets ready to celebrate.
Lloyd’s once offered to insure Warne’s hand for a =A31-million, a fair enough reflection of his precious ability to rip the side of a cricket ball with a zip and accuracy no one has ever matched. In Australia it has been mooted that the steel spring in that wrist was built when, as a boy, Warne broke both legs and had to haul himself around on wheels for a while.
That is nice soap opera — apt enough in the case of a cricketer who seems, with the diamond earstud and the easy grin — to have wandered in from the set of Neighbours. But this is the man who has changed the grammar of modern cricket: the slow bowler who has punctured the easy domination of the fast men; the beach bum who might even (turn away if you hate hyperbole) be the best bowler ever.
This always sounds like a silly claim to make about anyone. But in Warne’s case it is not entirely idiotic. In six years of international cricket he has taken 240 wickets in 52 matches. Given that he is not yet 28, has already suffered and recovered from a serious injury and can plausibly expect to play for another 50 Tests or so, he is well set to surpass Kapil Dev’s present record of 434 wickets, possibly by some distance.
That’s all very impressive. But Warne is worth rather more than the numb arithmetic of his achievements. He is one of those special sportsmen who seemed to arrive fully formed, in a single peroxide-white flash.
He is now famous for the first ball he bowled at a Test match in England — the one four years ago that hung in the air for an instant, swerved in at Mike Gatting’s pads, then abruptly changed its mind and skimmed the other way. The next day’s papers featured pictures of Gatting peering back though his legs at the broken stumps with a look of frank disbelief. A pleasant shiver of appreciation and alarm rippled into far-flung pavilions, especially when that ball turned out not to be a fluke. For the next few months the ball carried on swerving in, and spinning away, and England were — to say the least — well and truly Warned.
In truth, it wasn’t that simple. Warne hadn’t had an easy introduction to sporting celebrity. He grew up in a smartish suburb of Melbourne, won a sports scholarship to a fashionable college, and showed plenty of early promise (at school he opened the bowling). But in 1989 he spent the summer playing cricket in Bristol and gained, among other things, two stone (all that heavy Pommie ale).
He won a place at Australia’s much-vaunted cricket academy, but in the spartan, committed atmosphere of Aussie sport, Shane didn’t really shine. He was the academic fatboy, a bit of a layabout who couldn’t stay off the junk food, drank too much and fooled around too much, and he ended up being suspended and thrown out.
He was lucky, however. Australia was on the lookout for leg-spinners and Warne was taken back into the fold, read the riot act and indulged. Just in time, Warne woke up. He shed those two stones of Somerset stout, played his way into the Victoria state team and, four games later, was picked by Australia.
Victoria’s captain, Simon O’Donnell, predicted disaster. “If you bowl leg-spinners in this country they go a bit unky-funky,” he said sourly. “The kid needs to go though his apprenticeship.” It looked for a while as if he might be right. In that first Test match (against India) Warne took one for 150. But a few games later he clicked, winning a Test match in Colombo with three wickets for no runs and then bowling the West Indies to defeat with seven cheap wickets in Melbourne. He came to England as the finished article.
Still, there’s nothing like a wonder ball to catch the eye of the marketing men and the one that got Gatting was a firework. Warne was the nearest thing to unplayable most cricket fans had ever seen. What could anyone do? The guy delivered balls that most bowlers could only dream about, absurd fantasy balls of the sort cartoonists draw when the hero needs a quick wicket.
When he got bored he went round the wicket and bowled oustide the leg stump into the rough — a crazy angle of attack, according to previous wisdom. But no one knew how to play him. Batsmen tried to kick it away with their pads but missed and were humiliatingly bowled; or the ball slithered up and hit them on the glove and that was that.
The tributes flowed like champagne. Old hands were not always swift to delcare the present superior to the past, but Warne’s emergence obliged almost everyone to agree that he was a cut above. “Potentially,” said Doug Walters, “he is the best ever.” Greg Chappell said simply: “He has redefined the art.” A week before his death in 1992, the former Test leg-spinner Bill O’Reilly said: “One day a kid will come along, bowl everyone over with leg breaks and become a millionaire.” He probably wasn’t thinking of Warne, at that time a tubby tearaway with a hopeless bowling average of 228; but he turned out to be right.
And it wasn’t just cricket. Warne seemd an emblematically new kind of Australian: not glowering and bloody-minded, like those slant-eyed Chappells and Borders who had contrived to make Australia seem, to the rest of us, like Yorkshire with surf. Warne grinned a lot; he looked happy — enough in itself, in the sometimes joyless cricket world, to make him seem like a rebel.
He had a modern, urban streak — he wore baseball caps back-to-front, went to nightclubs, and smoked. So he ended up breaking new ground commercially too. He was signed by Nike for more than =A3500 000, an early part of the bad-boy glamour they were pushing — and quite a coup, given that Nike didn’t even make cricket gear. He promoted jeans and sports-boosting drinks, sunglasses and watches. He wrote a lucrative newspaper column and charged for radio spots.
As a player, he was earning perhaps 10 times that. He was attractively waggish: at one press conference he beguiled his audience by announcing, Ali-like, that he had perfected a boomer-ball, a ball that would spin out of his hand, curve in a full circle and come back to him.
It was odd. A cricketer as a cheeky rebel? A contradiction in terms, surely. But the cricket world had been changed by television, and it wasn’t a coincidence that Warne’s emergence coincided neatly with a technical advance: the super-slow-motion cameras.
In the flesh he seems nothing special. But on TV you can see the grimace, the sudden torque as his shoulder twists and pulls, the wince as the wrist wrenches through the ball; and you can watch in lavish close-up that stunning trajectory, the ball fizzing away on its fierce loop towards the batsman.
It looks aggressive, and that’s new too. Not long ago, spin was what you bowled if you couldn’t really bowl — a job for swots, for boys who wore glasses and couldn’t run. Spin was all about unfashionable, sneaky things like craft, guile and patience. Warne made it nasty, with an edge of bully-boy hostility.
In South Africa he pursued a hapless Andrew Hudson back to the pavilion, snorting invective all the way. He was fined and banned. So it was almost natural that he should be one of the players (along with Mark Waugh) at the centre of the bribery allegations aginst Pakistan’s captain Salim Malik, which wound up getting nowhere but which threw clouds of smoke over the whole business of cricket in Asia.
Those allegations had a magical ending. The accused man, Salim Malik, was backed by his own cricket authorities and sent down to Australia to prove his innocence in cricket’s highest court — out there in the middle. And who should be bowling when he came out to bat? Who else? Warne got him out four balls later.
“It showed there is justice in the game,” he said afterwards. Few, in Australia, disagreed. Warne had been exonerated by poetic justice.
In a nice Neighbours touch he “dedicated” the wicket to his family, who stood by him, etc.
Warne received death threats before last year’s World Cup, advising him that he was coming to the subcontinent at his peril and the affair took a while to fade. When he expressed reservations about the security situation in Sri Lanka (following a bomb blast in Colombo), joking that it would be hard to go shopping, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister replied loftily: “Shopping is for sissies”.
He gets booed whenever he plays overseas — he makes such a perfect cocky pantomime villain.
The myth has cooled somewhat lately. Warne got married (a bad move so far as the naughty-boy Nike contract goes) and has been injured. His shoulder tore itself up and last year he had an operation on his hand in New York. And on the eve of the first Test in Australia there is a storm in the media about his weight.
But in a Test match, with batsmen playing defensively on a worn wicket, fielders clustered round the bat, and an older, easier-to-grip ball to fizzle and flip, he might be a different proposition.