Australians had turned against bad-boy bowler Shane Warne after yet another SMS sex scandal and the tacky front-page split with his long-suffering wife.
Sponsors had cancelled their contracts with him and angry cricket fans had called on selectors to leave the serial philanderer and convicted drug cheat out of the team to face England in the annual Ashes five-game Test series.
Three games into the series and Warne is the hero of the hour.
The world’s leading Test wicket-taker has redeemed himself by some vintage leg-spin bowling and plucky performances with the bat.
There has even been talk of the 35-year-old bottle blond getting back the vice-captaincy that was taken away from him as penance for his loutish off-field behaviour.
When Australia’s pace attack faltered, Warne was there to skittle England with his prodigious spin. When it was left to the middle-order batsmen to dig the side out of a hole, the bloke from Black Rock in Victoria put on a command performance — even top-scoring when Australia miraculously tied the crucial third Test at Old Trafford.
Imperturbability under fire endeared Warne to cricket commentators who had been cheerily predicting his chaotic social life would wreck his game.
”Warne’s secret is that he always tries to be at the peak of his form,” said Australian bowling coach Terry Jenner after the Old Trafford masterclass in which Warne became the first player in the world to take 600 Test wickets.
The 600th dismissal set off a crackerjack of Warne tributes.
Former England captain Mike Atherton, commenting on a 13-year Test career, said: ”It’s the amount of spin and drift that he gets, plus his accuracy — that’s what sets him apart.”
Cricket buffs the world over banged on about Warne being the most important cricketer of modern times and single-handedly resuscitating the flagging art of leg-spin.
It was at Old Trafford, in his first Ashes Test, that Warne had dismissed Mike Gatting with a fizzer that proclaimed him the new king of spin. And it was at Old Trafford last week that the redoubtable Warne showed that even a torrid time in the tabloids and in his 10-year marriage couldn’t shake his self-confidence.
”Over the years, every game I play, people say ‘he’s no good any more’ and write me off,” Warne said in the lead up to that game.
”Then I have a good game and people say ‘he’s as good as ever’.”
It was prophetic: at Old Trafford he led the bowling in the first session with 4-99.
The most telling thumbs-up came this week from sportswriter Peter Lalor. Writing in national daily The Australian, he declared: ”In three Ashes Tests he has proved beyond any doubt that he is one of the greatest cricketers and sportsmen of his generation. That he is a supremely gifted bowler is beyond question, but he is more than that and he has demonstrated it when his team needed him most”.
Most Australians are now with Lalor and prepared to forgive Warne his manifold indiscretions. He’s back in their good books and the sponsors who cut him adrift now look to have acted prematurely.
Paul Sheehan, a leader writer with The Sydney Morning Herald, has so far kept mum about Warne’s heroics in England. It was Sheehan, remember, who earlier this year declared public patience to be at an end.
”He can rut with whomever he likes, but as a serial liar he should never again be allowed to debase the Australian colours by wearing them,” Sheehan had fulminated.
Those sentiments are now out of step with public opinion.
Incorrigible he may be, but Warne has proved a valiant fighter for his country’s honour.
Sports-mad Australians are as likely to see him as a saint than a stain on the game. Those with just a passing interest in the crack of willow and leather will now be tempted to just see a split personality and let the better side shine in the light.
As Lalor wrote: ”The man is a genius and a goose. Proud and pathetic. A defiant warrior and a deceitful philanderer. He could be canonised, or fired from one — both acts would be similarly legitimate”. – Sapa-DPA