The retirement of Shane Warne taught Australian selectors you cannot manufacture champions

IT’s 10 years next week since Shane Warne walked out for his last Test and Australia set on a mission to replace the irreplaceable. Robert Craddock examines how it played out.

Shane Warne saluting crowd.

IT’s 10 years next week since Shane Warne walked out for his last Test and Australia set on a mission to replace the irreplaceable.

The search for the new Warne was a bit like the hunt for your family pet who escapes when you are on holidays.

It starts out frantic but winds down to a matter of you leaving out a few incentives and hoping he lobs on your doorstep.

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For Australia has learnt you cannot manufacture champions. They either drop from the heavens or they don’t.

And the challenge to develop a new Warne was complicated by the fact that no-one ever really got to the bottom of why he was as great as he was.

Was it the power of his thick, sausage-like fingers? Was it the rat cunning of his bowling plans? Was it the natural love of contest forged by his years as a battling football player?

Shane Warne celebrates after taking his 700th Test wicket: Picture: Stuart Mcevoy

Was it just the fact that everything that mattered — his wrist, fingers, shoulder and hips — were in perfect alignments to deliver the supreme leg-spinner.

The suspicion is it was a spoonful of all of these, most of which are uncoachable.

The words of Warne’s late mentor Terry Jenner when Warne shot to fame in 1993, remain prophetic. “Shane will inspire thousands of kids to take up leg-spin but don’t expect more Test leg-spinners because the trade is so tough,’’ he said.

And so it proved. Revealing confirmation is a photo at an Australian under-19 carnival in the late 1990s where a group of leg-spinning Wannabe Warnies, with their dyed blond hair and ear-rings, brimmed with the wide-eyed ambition of youth.

But that was essentially their last moment of fame with most finishing up being pasted around district grounds and leaving the game with their heads down.

New fangled equipment allows Australia to measure the amount of times slow bowlers spin the ball in the air before it gets to the batsman and there is always great excitement when the computer confirms that a youngster turns it as much as Warne.

But the catch is that Warne could spin it like a top and land it on a sixpence. No-one since his retirement came close to being what he was — an artist and a penny-pinching accountant in the one package.

Since Warne’s retirement young spinners have had psychological tests done on them to help their mental progress and this was another area where Warne’s prowess was actually underestimated.

He was always lauded for his skill but rarely for his toughness.

Shane Warne works with Bryce McGain in 2008.

Yet when surgeons operated on his damaged should they could not believe the pain he would have been feeling to bowl.

Australia has produced five exceptional leg-spinners — Warne, Bill O’Reilly, Carrie Grimmett, Stuart MacGill and Richie Benaud — in 140 years of Tests so one every 20-30 years of fossicking normally finds a gold nugget.

Nathan Lyon has done a fine job in holding the fort during a potentially perilous era for Australia who found that most of the 12 spinners who followed Warne (Beau Casson, Bryce McGain, Michael Beer, Ashton Agar among them) played four Tests or less.

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The leg-spinner issue comes into firm focus for Australia — again — over the next few weeks as Australia decides whether to expose a young leg spinner to the rugged challenges of a four-Test tour of India.

The case for a young bowler like Queensland and Australia A spinner Mitchell Swepson is that English leggie Adil Rashid took 23 wickets in the just-completed five Test tour.

The sobering stat is that even the great Warne averaged 43 runs per wicket in India. If the master had to survive on thin pickings then its starvation rations for the rest.

Originally published as The retirement of Shane Warne taught Australian selectors you cannot manufacture champions