Shane Warne: Cricket’s Grandmaster has left the chessboard

A haul of 708 wickets in 145 Tests would be enough to make any cricketer one of the very best, but what Warne brought in the way of drama and cerebral stimulation added another dimension to the game. It ended up forcing most batsmen to play the bowler as much as the ball, such was the bluster, competitive spirit and cricketing intelligence oozing out of the man with the golden fingers and the magic wrist.

Conventional wisdom will have it that a delivery from a tweaker can do one of the three: spin into a batsman, away from him, or go straight on. But the vagaries of flight, drift, dip, pace and bounce ensured the ball seemed to have a fickle mind of its own, which could change midway through its journey. This, allied to the mind games that Warne revelled in, often got the better of the best. He was never shy of having a word or two with the batsman. Rather than verbal abuse which it can often descend into, Warne tried to implant something into the batsman’s mind that wasn’t there. Forcing him to think about what could come, rather than what will.

Remember Sydney 1995, when Pakistan’s Basit Ali was foxed by nothing else but the spinner’s ability to get under the batsman’s skin. Basit had been holding up bowlers on several occasions, prompting the Aussies to get irritated. Before the last ball of the day, with Basit on strike, Warne called wicketkeeper Ian Healy for a lengthy chat. It seemed they were discussing what to bowl, but it could very easily have been dinner plans. A peeved Basit clearly took his eye off the ball – in more ways than one – to his own detriment.

A couple of generations, and a bit more, of English batsmen were left scarred by the bowler with the casual walk to the wicket. It seemed the supercomputer in the brain was constantly processing data on the way to the bowling crease. Cricket is a physical activity, but in Warne’s case it became almost an intellectual exercise.

One may argue that the ineptness of most English batsmen through the 1990s and early 2000s would probably have succumbed to a bowler of much lesser pedigree, but famed practitioners of the willow from around the world fell prey to Warne’s wiles.

Captain extraordinaire

This uncanny ability to read the game and the batsmen, an attacking mindset and positive outlook at all times made him a tactical genius. His motivational prowess often made unheralded players perform better than expected. Who can forget what he did with a rag-tag Rajasthan Royals bunch in the inaugural Indian Premier League season in 2008! Indiscretions off the field meant he never stepped into the role with Australia on a permanent basis. The teams under Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting enjoyed a great deal of success, but having Warne at the helm would arguably have added a dose of drama to proceedings. He seemed to enjoy living on the edge and brought that streak into his cricket. One feels he would have risked losing in order to win more matches.

Shane Warne poses for the cameras during another wet day in Hampshire. (File Photo)

That analytical mind and quick grasp of a situation was also evident after his playing days, as the Victorian moved seamlessly to the commentary box. His opinions were often radical – he recently questioned Steve Smith’s utility and spot in the Australian T20I team – but Warne always had reasons to back up his views.

His stature in the game revived the entire genre of leg-spin bowling. At one time in the 1990s, Warne, Anil Kumble and Mushtaq Ahmed – three very different practitioners of the same craft – made life difficult for batsmen everywhere.

But the Aussie legend was never secretive about his skills and what made him different and greater than the others. Rather than the physical prowess, Warne laid more emphasis on the mental and psychological aspects of the game.

The Grandmaster of Cricket has left the chessboard much too early.