The Australian leg-spinner brought colour to cricket but his powers have been fading recently
David Hopps
The one thing that can be predicted with certainty about Shane Warne’s Ashes summer is that there will not be another Ball of the Century. The bleach-blond Australian may still be one of cricket’s leading attractions, but life does not come as easily these days.
From the moment he chose his first ball in Test cricket in England to bowl Mike Gatting with a leg-break summoned from the gods, Warne’s status as a cricketing idol was assured. Worldwide acclaim resounded, teenage girls sighed in admiration and it was fondly imagined that every spare patch of land teemed with budding leg-spinners eager to revive an art he had saved from extinction.
But that was the 20th century. Eight years on, Warne warms to his task as slowly as a 1950s telly. Debili-tating injuries and a bushed mental state have provided evidence in black-and-white of a gradual decline. For longer than he cares to remember, the colour has been departing from his game.
England has always been good to Warne when he is not hounding their batsmen, he returns annually to visit old drinking pals and he has never been more in need of happy reminiscences. He arrived from a dispiriting Test series defeat in India that ended Australia’s run of 16 successive Test victories and identified him as a potential scapegoat. Speculation raged that he might not even make the Ashes cut.
He was spared, but it has since been suggested that Colin Miller, an adaptable medium pacer-cum-off-spinner, endearingly individualistic but a workaday professional approaching 40, might be Australia’s first-choice Test spinner. Though Warne figured in the one-day series, which Australia won, he is scrapping in the pack for the Tests.
It was not surprising, therefore, that at Lord’s recently Warne looked a touch uptight. The convict’s haircut accentuated the mood, but no longer was there the bouncy exuberance of a great sportsman confident in his ability to charm the world. Career-threatening operations, first to his shoulder and then to the ring finger on his right hand, have turned his mind more potently than he now turns the ball.
“I’m getting on, I’m 32 now, and this might be my last England tour,” he admits. “I want to make it something special. I don’t dwell on the past, but I’ve done pretty well here so far. Some people think I’m under pressure, but I don’t feel that I am. I’m here to play well and if I don’t do well then I won’t play, just like everybody else.
“It takes me a while to warm up these days. Whereas before I could turn it sharply from the start, now I’m still accurate from ball one but there’s not as much spin. It takes me a few overs to get into my work rather than straight away.”
He dutifully exercises his shoulder with Thera-Bands, to prevent it creaking like an old staircase and maintain its range of movement. He squeezes a tennis ball to strengthen the damaged finger that has lost some of its sensitivity. As Terry Jenner, his leg-spin mentor, memorably expressed it: “After the operation there was a change in the feeling. You lick your finger and the taste is not there.”
Warne has also had to contend with a shift in Australia’s tactical approach since Steve Waugh replaced Mark Taylor as captain. Taylor was heavily reliant upon Warne’s gifts, opting to bat first whenever possible, so allowing Warne to bowl mammoth spells on wearing fourth- innings pitches. But Waugh inherited a world-class pace attack and a great leg-spinner showing signs of burnout. Warne’s role in the side had to diminish.
“My role has changed a bit and I’ve had to adapt to that,” he says. “It’s just a change of tactics, and rightly so with the quality of our quick bowlers. But I don’t get to bowl on days four and five much any more and that’s one reason why you don’t see the ball turning as big. This trip I’ll be concentrating more on the stock stuff.”
Australia’s leading wicket taker of all time now talks of making himself useful with late-order runs, reliable slip catches and “a few wickets every now and then”. A valuable contribution, to be sure, but no longer the stuff of legends.
When Warne’s appeal was at his peak in that magical, flaxen-haired English summer of 1993, one newspaper paid him a substantial fee to pose topless. Now when he strips to the waist, the temptation is to check out the excess weight he is carrying. But the official stance is that he is at his lightest for four years. If statistics cannot always be trusted, a surreptitious investigation during a net session largely supported the contention. A quick estimate from afar was that he probably needs to lose only about 5kg.
Such a conservative view would not qualify for the Barmy Army songbook, which this summer will delight in riling him that “he’s fat and round and bounces on the ground”. Neither will it find total support from Warne’s Burger King fan club. During Australia’s series on the subcontinent, one Indian cricket website recorded this exclamation of an Australian student, pint of lager in hand: “Shane Warne is a hero for fat bastards everywhere. When he was my age he was sitting down in front of the TV and watching cricket over a beer and fries.”
Add a few tabloid sex revelations, a tendency to curse in the vicinity of pitch microphones, a highly sponsored pretence at giving up smoking and a naive deal with an Indian bookmaker, and Warne, one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the century, has seen the esteem for him seep away with indecent haste.
But it is his fitness that bears most directly on this summer’s proceedings. Propose that he will remain a threat to England, offer a reminder that he has dismissed Alec Stewart, Graham Thorpe, Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton a total of 33 times in his career, and for many the response is not so much to chew the fat as positively savage it. These days most sports watchers are body fascists.
Warne has always been touchy about his weight. He is the only cricketer to storm out of Madame Tussaud’s because of a remark that his waxwork didn’t look fat enough. And when Australia’s coach John Buchanan wondered whether Warne among several senior players was physically tough enough to survive back-to-back Tests, the fallout was substantial.
Buchanan had to deny a strained relationship with his captain, Waugh. He was retained as coach but, much to his chagrin, lost his role as a Test selector. Australia protected Warne’s reputation like maids to an old dowager.
“I was very disappointed with what John had to say,” Warne admits. “He said he was just trying to pump the whole side up rather than launching a personal vendetta against me. I had a chat with him and Steve Waugh, and he realised he had made a bit of a blue, but I’m not the sort of guy to hold grudges.”
Although Warne claimed he saw little reason to change his habits, he hired a personal trainer in the weeks leading up to the Ashes tour and wondered how much longer he could make the effort.
“I never usually have personal training, but I suppose I wanted to make this tour something special. I was a bit surprised to learn I was the skinniest I had been for a while. I used to be able to go out and have a couple of beers or play some golf. Now cricket is becoming ever more professional: this so-called world of professionalism, with all these skin folds and beep tests and all these sorts of things. You’ve got to be fitter and fitter these days, I suppose.”
India has been the one team to prove consistently resistant to Warne’s magic. He rates Navjot Sidhu and Sachin Tendulkar as the best players of spin he has faced. But even allowing for that, his treatment by Vangipurappu Laxman in Chennai in March, during an extraordinary double century that won the series for India, must have left its scars.
“No other country has played me like that,” he says. “You think there are only so many times that Laxman can run down the wicket and hit you through the on side if the ball is turning out of the rough. Then, 280 runs later, he hasn’t mistimed one and you wonder if you should try something different.”
Buchanan sees Warne’s future as one of intelligent adaptation: “To bowl as brilliantly as he has generates a lot of stress on the body. That has affected his action. But great players are able to adapt their games as their careers develop.
“I would think the days of Shane producing four ripping leg-spinners in an over are probably gone forever. He has the capacity to do it, but not as often. He now mixes it up more and uses the big leg-spinner occasionally as a strike weapon. To just consider his career one tour at a time is healthy, a sign of his maturity. He has a very competitive nature and I can see him playing for a good while yet.”
But Buchanan and Warne are hardly natural soulmates. Buchanan is cool and analytical; Warne possesses a natural and careless warmth. Can Warne settle for a less glamorous supporting role, however valuable that might be, especially in a world that will interpret it as failure?
“If Shane Warne said tomorrow that he had had enough, it won’t be because of one particular thing,” Buchanan says. “It would be because of a general weariness with everything. The real issue would be the amount of cricket played, the physical demands, the spotlight he is under, the long weeks spent away from home and a desire to try new things.
“At the moment I think he is coping exceptionally well. He retains a real desire. After all his injuries, it is that desire which has got him out the other side.”