‘What an SMS I’m in’: Why Shane Warne’s flaws made him so relatable

Shane Warne has written a lot of cheques for a lot of people. He was the subject of dozens of books, six of them his own, including the curiously named Shane Warne: My autobiography. Who else’s autobiography could it have been?

Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly sang about him. Shane Warne, truly a sporting magician. Always played like a man on a mission …

So did satirist Kevin “Bloody” Wilson. A cricketin’ legend, all Australian boy. A real bloke’s bloke and we all loved him for it. But he’s got a zipper problem and it’s affectin’ his game. So Warnie put your wanger away …

So did the Irish pop group Duckworth-Lewis Method, about The Ball of the Century to dismiss Mike Gatting. It was … Jiggery-pokery, trickery-chokery, how did he open me up? Robbery! Muggery! Aussie skull duggery, out for a buggering duck!

He appeared in Neighbours and Kath and Kim as himself, the role he was most comfortable with.

His story was retold more recently in Amazon Prime’s documentary Shane, which was released earlier this year.

But if any piece of popular culture sums up his life, as we disbelievingly grapple with the news that he has died of a heart attack at just 52, it’s the hilarious Shane Warne: The Musical.

Warne was initially furious about the project, wondering how someone could do such a thing without his permission.

Then he met with the man who wrote and played him, Eddie Perfect, attended the premiere at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre in late 2008, and got up on stage at the end and said how much he loved it.

“I think I was better in my jocks than Eddie,” Warne joked of the scene when Perfect appeared in his Playboy underwear with two scantily clad women that replicated a sting from London newspaper News Of The World in 2006.

The musical was a rollicking retrospective every aspect of the Warne story, including his drugs ban, meeting John the Bookie, and the rampant philandering that led to the demise of his marriage. The final song: “What an SMS I’m in”.

Remarkably, Warne sat in the crowd and chuckled away. At himself.

He lived an extraordinary life, and carved out an extraordinary career, but it was his flaws that made him so relatable, especially to a whole generation of young men, for better and worse.

He wrestled with his weight, his hairline, his libido and his addiction to cigarettes. He was a man of simple, suburban tastes: he scoffed down ham-and-pineapple pizzas and baked beans on toast. Post-career, he’d meet with Channel Nine executives in high-end restaurants to discuss extending his commentating contract and order two kids-sized servings of spaghetti bolognaise.

He was a slob like the rest of us - OK, some of us – and he was loved for it because he was unapologetically Shane Keith Warne, whether he was dancing with a stump above his head on the balcony after an Ashes Test win at Trent Bridge, or wrapping his mouth around the top of a beer glass while attending a race meeting at Royal Ascot, knowing photographers were snapping his every move.

He became our hero because he was an ordinary kid who came from nothing, who did extraordinary things.

As a sportsman, Warne was that rare blend of supreme skill and even better showman. He had a greater sense of theatrical timing than those who performed in the musical depicting his life.

“Football is a game of deceit,” Diego Maradona once said. It’s got nothing on leg-spin bowling, an art form which had been essentially forgotten until the tubby blond kid with piercing green eyes and diamond earring started flit-flit-flitting the ball through the air, destination unknown to everyone but himself.

He’s most remembered for the jiggery-pokery of The Gatting Ball in 1993 – Warne’s first delivery in an Ashes series – and fair enough. Watching replays of Gatting glancing back at Warne, still wondering what happened, raising his eyebrows in utter defeat, will never grow old.

But Warne has in recent years called the delivery a “fluke”, a rare concession of his own superpowers.

Indeed, deceit was his greatest attribute.

How many of his 708 Test poles can be attributed to simply spooking the batsman into a false shot? Warne plotted the opposition’s demise like he was Hitchcock; the long discussions with captain Mark Taylor and keepers Ian Healy and then Adam Gilchrist, the over-exaggerated appeals, the exasperated “oooohs”, folding of the arms and stroking of the chin like some evil genius.

Then came the Zooter, or the Slider, or the Flipper. Or the Mystery Ball, which he would declare on the eve of each series.

Time and again, he fooled the batsman into thinking a ball would turn at right angles, only for it to stay true and thud into the pad or stumps.

He retired in 2006, at the peak of his powers, and soon enough he appeared to be someone who couldn’t let go, launching his own brands of wine, gin and fragrance.

Kerry Packer once advised him about commentating: “Son, don’t treat me like a dummy. We cricket fans love cricket. I can see the TV, the pictures and what’s happening. Please don’t patronise me and tell me what I’ve seen. Tell me why it’s happening.”

Warne often defaulted to brutal criticism, especially in recent years when the current generation of Australian players came under heavy fire.

His regular takedowns of Australian paceman Mitchell Starc seemed petulant, like he was trying to prove a point, which amused those who remember Warne being the most sensitive player in the team whenever he was questioned by the media.

Warne couldn’t understand the criticism of his criticism. He was simply being himself, Warnie, unashamedly himself right until the very end.

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