Andy Capostagno: Cricket
One hundred and forty seven is an important number. It was the number of the bus I used to catch to school and it was the number achieved for the first time in the world snooker championships by the reformed Canadian pool hustler, Cliff Thorburn. When Thorburn sank 15 reds, 15 blacks and all the colours at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield he was so emotionally drained that he wobbled at the knees and could scarcely sip the champagne thrust upon him.
Last week at one of the world’s great cricket grounds, Eden Gardens, Calcutta, Shane Warne left the field of play with 147 on his mind. His bowling figures, in the one and only innings required by India to win the first Test, read 42-4-147-0.
India scored 633 for five, declared, their highest score ever against Australia. They also broke the Aussies winning run of nine series under Mark Taylor. They might have broken something more important. The spirit of a great bowler.
The signs have been there for a while now. Warne was the complete leg-spinner for only a couple of seasons. He found that bowling the googly placed too much strain on his shoulder and sought instead to perfect the best top-spinner, or flipper as the Aussies call it, that the game has ever seen.
Daryll Cullinan will attest to the level to which Warne brought that one delivery. Cullinan might also be fond of the irony which saw him return to prominence with a century against Sri Lanka at Newlands on the same day that Warne marched into the Eden Gardens dressing room with none for 147 against his name.
But the flipper is now also a thing of the past. The operation to the knuckle on the ring finger of Warne’s bowling hand which took place two years ago was deemed a success. Ian Healy would tell press conference after press conference that “Warney” was back, but it was plain to see he was not. The zip was gone and so, largely, was the deception.
He was a significant factor in Australia’s series win over South Africa earlier this year, just as he had been in England in 1997. But he was a factor despite himself. He frightened people into giving their wickets away. He was Goliath before the fateful meeting with the Jewish bantamweight. Mike Tyson before Buster Douglas. A disaster waiting to happen.
There have been those who could cope with disaster better than others. One of those was, strangely enough, an Australian leg-spinner from a different era, the great Arthur Mailey.
Mailey participated in a run feast even more prodigious than the Indians at Eden Gardens and, like Warne, he was on the wrong end of it. Victoria scored 1 107 in a Sheffield Shield match against Mailey’s New South Wales in Melbourne in 1926, still the highest first class total ever achieved.
Mailey retreated with the figures of four for 365, still the worst bowling analysis in first class cricket. Asked about his experience his memorable reply was, “My figures would have been a damn sight better, but I had four catches put down by a man in a bowler hat in the cheap seats.”
Experience suggests that Warne is unlikely to take his medicine in the same laid-back manner. In Australia he is a big fish in a small goldfish bowl and recently walked out of a photo opportunity when the question of his expanding girth was aired. He is fortunate in a way that his none for 147 has come in far away Calcutta and not on Australian soil, but if his performance in the final Test this week is not dramatically better, we had better start looking for a new man to start a love-hate relationship with.
Warne is still young and may well come back, but leg-spin is based so completely upon self-confidence that I doubt it. He has always confounded the perceived ideas about leg-spin, eschewing the one bad ball an over that was de rigueur for a century, bowling around the wicket to right-handers and generally making the whole thing look hugely simple.
He was so good that the gradual decline of the Australian bowling attack could be camouflaged for a long time. The seamers might make no headway with the new ball, particularly if Glenn McGrath was absent, but Mark Taylor knew he could throw the ball to the maestro and the maestro would not let him down. No more.
If Makhaya Ntini’s Test debut was the beginning of a new age, Shane Warne’s none for 147 was the end of an old one. We may never see his like again. Then again, there might be a formerly disadvantaged wrist-spinner plying his trade just around the corner. That would be nice.