Eleven years ago Shane Warne had the record book in his sights. The leg-
spinner had taken only 141 Test wickets when he said he intended to beat Kapil Dev’s record of 434. One commentator wrote: ”Experts are projecting an eventual tally of 500 wickets, even 600, which is surely fanciful since it does not take into account injuries, fatigue or the possibility that plays on Warne’s mind and concentrates it that one day the magic will suddenly die.”
Warne went on to become the most prolific spinner in Test history (beating Lance Gibbs’s 309 wickets in 1998), Australia’s top wicket-taker (trumping Dennis Lillee’s 355 in 2000) and eventually the leading Test wicket-taker of all time.
In 2000 Wisden named him as one of the five greatest cricketers ever, the only contemporary player so honoured. If things go to according plan for him over the next few weeks he will hit that 600 mark and surpass even the most fanciful expectation. And if things work out for Warne they are likely to work out for Australia.
If things don’t work out he is more likely to star on the front pages than the back.
Over the years he has gambled, drunk, womanised and harassed his way into the headlines.
In 1994 he was fined £2 000 for shouting abuse at the South Africa’s Andrew Hudson as the opening batsman left the pitch.
In 1995 he revealed that the Pakistan batsman Salim Malik had offered him $200 000 to bowl poorly in a Test in Karachi — an offer he refused. In 1998 it emerged that he had accepted £3 000 from an Indian bookie in 1994 for information about pitch conditions for a one-day match in Sri Lanka — a story that cost him an estimated £200 000 in cancelled newspaper columns and the future captaincy of Australia, which he was desperate for.
In 1999 he blew his lucrative advertising deal with Nicorette by smoking in public.
In 2003 he was banned from the Australian game for taking drugs — he claimed his mother had given him the diuretic to help him lose his double chin. Perhaps his most infamous encounter with the front pages occurred in 2000 after he harassed a married woman with repeated obscene text messages.
The astonishing thing is that, despite his myriad misdemeanours, he has performed brilliantly and consistently over the years — a rare mix. Before the start of the Ashes he had taken 583 wickets at 25,51 — 44 more wickets than Sri Lanka’s off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, who has taken the second highest number of Test wickets at the lower average of 22,86. He is not a flawed hero to his fans. He is simply a hero.
It is late April and the Twenty20 Cup competition is being launched at Hampshire’s Rose Bowl stadium. Warne has just bought a house in Hampshire for himself, his wife Simone and their three children and is the county captain. He is 35 now but looks every bit the enfant terrible he did two decades ago — wacky blond highlights, ear stud, huge emerald eyes, hands behind his back, legs apart, joshing with his mates as the marketing men talk up the competition. His face is weathered but he looks fit.
Will Kintish, an expert in networking and positive thinking, is talking to the assembled cricketers and journalists about Twenty20. He says one of the great things about the format is that it’s all done and dusted so early that everybody can be in the bar by six o’clock. ”Yeah, six in the morning,” Warne mutters to his team-mate, Kevin Pietersen.
Pietersen, with his two-tone peroxide mohican and attacking flair, regards Warne as something of a role model. ”He’s just a genius, he’s a one-off,” he says. ”The thing about him is that he gets misunderstood and misconstrued so much. People think he’s this naughty boy; he’s got this image of being an absolute fool who nobody likes, but he’s one of the most generous, unselfish, well mannered people you could meet. Around the dressing room and around people he’s really well mannered and well spoken.”
So, why the image? ”Well, he likes the nightlife, he likes to have people around, he likes to be the centre of attention and, as the best cricketer that’s ever lived, he’s always going to be the centre of attention.”
Does Pietersen really think he’s the greatest cricketer ever? ”He’s the greatest bowler that’s ever played the game. Statistics prove it.”
Warne has always got himself into scrapes. He grew up in Black Rock, an affluent seaside suburb of Melbourne. His father was a financial planner and for a while his mother ran a surf shop. As a young boy he broke both legs and paddled around for a while in a cart; it has been suggested that this could be why his hands are so freakishly strong.
He did not apply himself to academic work but won a sports scholarship to a private school. His younger brother and manager, Jason, says they had a great childhood — forever playing sport, always competing with each other.
He has achieved so much more than he ever thought possible, Shane says, and here he is still breaking records at 35. Then he says something surprising, even by his standards. ”I was a guy who didn’t really like cricket. It was pretty boring to me … I’m very lucky to have had the opportunity to play cricket for Australia when it was never in my dreams or anything like that. I loved Australian rules football. It was physical, you smashed people, it was aggressive.”
By the time Warne was 16 his bowling was coming on nicely. ”It sounds old to be developing but actually it’s not for a leg-spinner,” says Jason Warne. ”If you can land it on the pitch as a leg-spinner at 16 you’re actually doing pretty well.”
There’s so much to learn and control is such an important part.” maybe done a few things differently but you can’t have regrets in your life.”
He has achieved so much more than he ever thought possible, he says, and here he is still breaking records at 35. Then he says something surprising, even by his standards. ”I was a guy who didn’t really like cricket. It was pretty boring to me . . . I’m very lucky to have had the opportunity to play cricket for Australia when it was never in my dreams or anything like that.
”I loved Australian rules football. It was physical, you smashed people, it was aggressive.” Had he been good enough to play professionally? ”No. I wasn’t tall enough, wasn’t fast enough.” He was good enough, though, to play for the reserves of St Kilda, the Melbourne team he supported.
By the time Warne was 16 his bowling was coming on nicely. ”It sounds old to be developing but actually it’s not for a leg-spinner,” says Jason Warne. ”If you can land it on the pitch as a leg-spinner at 16 you’re actually doing pretty well. There’s so much to learn and control is such an important part.”
When he was 19 he came to England to play league cricket in Bristol. But he did more eating and drinking than playing. It has often been reported that he put on two stone over one summer but he says that is simply not true. ”I put on close to 3 stone. I came over 81kg and was just off 100 when I went back. I drank every night and ate absolute rubbish for six months.”
It’s a shame Freddie Flintoff wasn’t around at that time, I say; he would have made a good sparring partner. ”Yeah, we would have had fun. I’ve had to settle down and not drink as much now. I’ll have a few glasses of red every now and then. If we win a good game I’ll have a few but it takes me a week to recover.”
Things are different now, he says. He talks tenderly about fatherhood and sounds almost weepy. ”I love being a dad. I don’t think unless you’ve got children you can understand when people say how rewarding it is. It’s a different love to anything else. When they get a cold, you cry, you’re upset. You would rather you have it.
”I mean, the whole birth is amazing, then to have the baby there in your arms and it’s part of you is amazing. Nothing can come near to that experience.”
Two years after his stint in Bristol he was called up to the prestigious Australian Academy. He was expelled – booze and blondes of course. Barely a year later, at 22 and after only four appearances for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield, he made his debut for Australia. He took one for 228 in his first Test. But the selectors persisted with him at a time when their English counterparts dumped promising players after one bad game. A few matches later he took three for nought in one spell against India and bowled the Australians to victory.
Then came that first Test ball in England, possibly the most famous ball in cricket history. Mike Gatting, a supposed master of spin, watched in disbelief as the ball drifted wide of leg stump, bounced, fizzed and spun back 18 inches on to his wicket and clipped off the bail.
Graham Gooch was Gatting’s partner at the non-batting end. What did he think when he saw that ball? He gives me a look that says ”bloody bewildered”.
”It was a fantastic ball, wasn’t it? A one-off. He couldn’t look back from there.”
Gooch stops, and changes his mind. Yes, he says, of course that ball anticipated Warne’s role in cricket history, but it did not guarantee it.
”He’s had his ups and downs in other departments but on the pitch he’s been a model of consistency. He’s a match- winning bowler. Most leg-spinners bowl wicket-taking balls but they bowl bad balls. He has got great control. Maybe in the first innings he’ll get a couple of wickets, then when the ball starts to turn in the second innings he’s a match-winner.”
With that one ball to Gatting, Warne made spin bowling sexy. He showed that in its own way spin can be as aggressive as bodyline bowling. He became the greatest ambassador for his art — he was cool and insouciant and chavish, a football star in cricketing whites. He became such a celebrity that his friends called him ”Hollywood”.
Aspiring cricketers started to peroxide their hair, wear earrings and talk about flippers and leg-breaks and toppies and googlies and zooters.
In 1997, halfway through an Ashes tour, he went home for the birth of his son, Brooke. He said he was a reformed character and had reprioritised his life. In 2000, when the newly tubby Warne first played for Hampshire, he said he was baffled by the way life had turned out.
”Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a soap. Wherever they go, whatever they do, some people just attract attention. Drama followed Ian Botham and John McEnroe and now I reckon I come into the same category.”
Two months later the splash headline in the Mirror was ”Married cricket legend harasses a mum for sex with obscene phonecalls”.
After nurse Donna Wright had brushed him off in Leicester nightclub he bombarded her with text messages — pornographic, uninvited and unforgivable.
She said: ”It was perverted. I could not believe this man who is admired worldwide for his cricket could be so revolting.”
He said it was an aberration, that at heart he was a devoted family man. And in a way it was true — he was devoted to his family. But he was also devoted to a number of unsavoury pursuits. It emerged that he had something of a history as a text pest.
Remarkably even this did not dampen his popularity. Somehow he was always forgiven, not least because of his record on the pitch. The more disrepute he fell into, the better he seemed to perform.
In 2001 he took 31 wickets in the five-match Ashes series, a year later he bagged 27 against Pakistan (a record for a three-match series) as he raced past 400 wickets. Geoff Boycott said there was only one safe way to play him — from the other end.
In 2003 he was sent home from the World Cup in Johannesburg in disgrace after testing positive for a diuretic (conspiracy theorists point out that diuretics mask steroids and Warne had just recovered from a shoulder injury remarkably quickly).
His team-mates were devastated that such a senior player had been so daft. To make matters worse he announced his departure at a press conference one hour before the first ball of the competition was due to be bowled.
Some colleagues say that he always has to be the centre of attention even if that means making a buffoon of himself. More supportive colleagues will say he has a good heart and loves to help people out. All agree that his need to be loved is second to none.
Yet again Warne made an astonishing comeback in 2004 after his year-long ban, taking 10 wickets in his first Test in Sri Lanka and another 10 in his second. The harder he falls, the bigger he comes.
It is mid-June, Hampshire are playing Surrey at the Rose Bowl and it is pissing down. I wander round the ground. There are a few designated car-parking spaces, one of them for the captain. Shane Warne’s scruffy black turbo powered BMW is parked next to a couple of spruce cars belonging to the manager and MD of Hampshire. I peer into Warne’s car — in the passenger seat there are two huge boxes containing 200 Benson & Hedges cigarettes each. Numerous family-size packs of crisps are discarded on the floor. In the back is a tot’s plaything.
John White, a volunteer in Hampshire’s souvenir shop, says that Warne has made the team so much more competitive. White also does the local hospital radio from the ground and the microphone is close enough to the pitch to pick up everything. ”Warney’s sledging comes through loud and clear — sometimes too loud and clear. When the wind’s in the right direction it’s very strong. He hasn’t taken that many wickets but he’s had a huge impact on the team.”
The shop is stuffed with numbered Hampshire T-shirts. Which shirt do they sell most of? ”Oh, 23 of course. It’s nearly always Warney they want.”
An elderly couple, Mary and Frank Ford, have been coming to Hampshire for decades and say they have not had it so good since the days of Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge. They won’t hear a word against Warne.
”He’s a brilliant captain,” Frank says.
”He makes things happen where games would have died a slow death. The best example of that is at Trent Bridge where he came to an agreement with Stephen Fleming the night before to turn a game that was dead and buried into a one-innings game.”
Mary Ford is pleased he seems settled at last. ”They’re a smashing family, honestly they are. Simone is such a nice person. She mixes with everybody and she prefers it that way actually. She’ll sit round here, not in the pavilion.” She points round to the unglamorous surrounds of the cheaper seats. ”And his kids stand up, don’t they — ‘Come on Warney’ they say. They don’t call him Dad.”
Two weeks later Warne is in the news again. On June 20 Laura Sayers (25) claims the cricketer stripped naked in front of her and begged her to have sex at Pietersen’s flat. On June 21 Simone says that she is used to stories like this and they are rubbish.
On June 26 the couple announce their separation. On June 28 Kerrie Collimore (31) comes forward to announce that she had a two-month affair with Warne — most of it, apparently, conducted on the bonnet of his BMW. On June 29 Michelle Masters claims she was pursued ”relentlessly” by Warne with text messages before succumbing to his advances.
It is early July. Warne is away in Spain trying to put his life together. The Australian media are finally beginning to lose patience. Malcolm Conn, a journalist who has followed Australia for 13 years, writes in the Australian newspaper that Warne’s ”failure to accept responsibility, his vanity, insecurity and fragile ego have made him a liability . . . the distraction and destruction of Cyclone Shane may yet prove Australia’s greatest Ashes enemy. He is always the victim. Cricket’s most successful bowler believes he is constantly attacked by dark forces summoned to persecute him.”
The dark forces take various forms — Warne believes he is a victim of the press, a victim of his celebrity, a victim of his own irresistibility. What he finds difficult to admit to is being a victim of his own weakness. I ask Jason Warne if managing Shane is the most difficult job in the world. He laughs. ”It has its moments. The positive outweigh the little hiccups we have on the way.”
I tell him that I met Shane just before the recent revelations and he seemed absolutely devoted to his children. ”Yeah, he is. He loves them to bits. They mean everything to him.” So will he be keen to make up with Simone? ”I prefer not to comment because I don’t live inside his head. All I will say is that whatever happens he’ll want to spend as much time as possible with the kids, even if they are living separately.” As his manager, does he ever tell Shane to discipline himself and get a grip on his private life? ”Sometimes I have a go at him, and sometimes he has a go at me, but I’m not going to go into details.”
I ask Jason if he has noticed how, when Shane gets into yet another scrape, he tends to respond with gigantic performances. ”Absolutely. He’s very strong-minded. Whenever there is negative press there is obviously more attention on him and Shane has generally responded very well to this”
On a personal level, things look bleaker than they ever had done for Warne. If his previous record is anything to go by, this could be bad news for England. – Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited