Warne wins India over

But, despite all the praise, there was a sense back home that they were being too kind. For all his wickets —- 1,001 in all in Tests and one-dayers — and his ‘ball of the century’ to Mike Gatting in the Ashes of 1993, Warne had never captured India’s imagination.

A cricketer’s worth in a country is often measured by how well he has done against them and, if Warne was Napolean, India was his Waterloo. Right from his Test debut — when he went for 150 runs for just one wicket in Sydney, to when he had nightmares about Tendulkar in 1998, till VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid took him apart in Kolkata to script India’s revival in 2001 — he was always on the receiving end.

If there was anything Warne regretted at the end of his career, it would perhaps be his Test bowling average of 47.18 against a country that is the spiritual home of spin.

Serial womanizer

Warne was always regarded as a genius with flaws, most of them to do with what the British tabloids described as his “serial womanising”. There was a time when he was more in the news for being a “sms pest” than he was for his wickets. He had a very public separation with his wife Simone Callahan, and then allegedly ended up sending her a suggestive message intended for someone else.

Other embarrassing sidelights of his eventful career were being fined for soliciting an Indian bookie, and getting banned from the 2003 World Cup because he consumed a banned substance which he claimed his mother had given him to help him lose weight.

All these incidents cost him a chance to ever captain the Australian team. Now, after the Rajasthan Royals’s win, he is being hailed as the ‘best captain Australia never had’. And, considering the almost insurmountable peak he has climbed over the last 45 days, a lot of people would perhaps buy into that theory.

Warne’s style of captaincy during these last six weeks will go down as stuff of legend. Dealing with players who were either in awe of him, or with whom it wasn’t easy for him to communicate, or both, he managed to create a sense of mutual trust in the dressing room.

“Everybody is equal in the team. If Shane Watson and Swapnil Asnodkar are late, they are given the same penalty,” Warne explained midway through the journey. “One of our team slogans is ‘find the way’ and also ‘play your role’,” he said at another time.

Breaking barriers

But, for an outsider, the hallmark of the campaign was the way Warne and his boys praised each other after every victory. While Swapnil Asnodkar and Yusuf Pathan spared no opportunity to shower credit on the leg-spinner for inspiring them, Warne has repeatedly given out headline-quotes about his young team mates.

“I will be 40 next year, a bit too old for these sort of finishes. But the players, they make me feel young,” he said after the nail-biting final, while crowds in the stands and in front of TV screens across India were indulgently shaking their heads in disbelief.

The success of the IPL would always depend on how team mates from different nationalities and cultures would combine as a unit, playing quality cricket and convincing fans that they really felt motivated to play for their adopted cities. Of all the captains in the tournament, it was Warne who truly broke the barriers.

From Mohammad Kaif to Graeme Smith to Sohail Tanvir, they all felt they belonged to Jaipur’s royal blue. In a tournament that was never expected to be any more than pulp fiction, Warne’s Rajasthan ended up scripting a classic.

So, 16 years after he started his international career and one-and-a-half after he finished it, Warne finally rules over the hearts and minds of Indian cricket fans. By succeeding with a team which was dismissed before the start of the IPL as a ‘rag-tag’ bunch, he has shown India what the rest of the world knew for a long time, and then a little more.