Gideon Haigh: In a prim, censorious game, Shane Warne was the soul of indiscretion

Shane Warne bows to the crowd at the end of day three of the fifth Ashes Test Match between Australia and England at the Sydney Cricket Ground on January 4, 2007. Picture: Getty Images

There will never be another Shane Warne, in part because of the astronomical odds against the original. No Australian cricketer achieved such distinctive greatness; no Australian athlete has attained such unique fame; no Australian man was as discussed, exalted, execrated, lauded and lampooned.

We can almost divide our conceptions of sport in this country into the pre-Warne and post-Warne eras, separated by the fifteen-year pageant of Warne’s unexampled successes. When he retired fifteen years ago, he left a hole rather like that left by Bradman, although he remained a guaranteed newsmaker and unignorable opinion former. He reckons that? He said what? But we always dutifully attended.

His death, aged 52, is as unexpected as any delivery he ever bowled. He had recently been the subject of a lavish documentary updating his story for new audiences and rekindling it for old. In it he looked reflective, almost mellow, accenting his relationship with his three children and featuring his doting parents. Their loss will be devastating.

Cricket’s too. For if you knew the game, Warne was a marvel. With its peculiar mechanics and dynamics, involving unrolling your wrist so that a 160g, 23cm sphere bounces and deviates from a faraway target point, the leg-break is as difficult a delivery to bowl as any conceived of. Thirty years ago, it was a skill perilously close to anachronism. Yet Warne made it look both natural and artful, both spontaneous and full of guile. No other sport plays such a premium on deception, and Warne was the great deceiver.

Shane Warne walks onto the field during day three of the Second Test between Australia and South Africa at the MCG. Picture: Getty Images

But if you didn’t know cricket, he was a marvel too. You did not need to know the LBW law, or the fine shadings of field placement, to intuit that Warne with the ball was a prodigy and on the field a presence. He also remained a demotic figure, who for all his unique gifts continued to look and sound like his countrymen. He smoked. He carried some weight. He was a little flash, if at the same time careless of appearances. There’s something piquant about his passing in the same week as Neighbours; both, in their time, were cultural properties that to a wider world embodied Australia.

We were blessed that Warne was born into an age when the televised coverage of sport attained access to unprecedented worldwide audiences and offered extraordinary intimacy with the action, enabling his methods to be studied, interpreted and relished as never before.

Warne would, of course, have been a great bowler in any era, but technology made his handiwork exceptionally delectable: the opportunity to see a particular delivery again and again, fast and slow, from this angle and that; the chance to study the reaction of the batsman, to be caught up in the urgency of the commentary, to savour the appeal’s jagged edge and the crowd’s acclamation.

How many times can you watch a batsman nick an outswinger, a standard quick bowler’s wicket? Satisfying as it may be, it needn’t detain you long. Yet here we are, years after the relevant games have ended and the contexts are forgotten, still watching replays of Warne, and wondering … how did he do that?

Out of individual deliveries, in fact, he created events. No-one had even spoken of a “Ball of the Century” let alone considered candidates before Warne bowled it, 93 years into the 1900s. Yet there seemed no disputing the tag, and the delivery will be the benchmark of any candidate for the 2000s.

Still, Warne could also make magic from the prosaic. ‘The trick is to make the batsman think you’re doing something even when you’re not,’ he aphorised. Nobody choreographed an over like Warne. Nobody hovered at the end of their mark as pregnantly. Nobody looked at an umpire as searchingly after an appeal was turned down. Nobody played on the batsman’s mind so incessantly, made more of the duel of egos in cricket’s head-to-head contests, and backed himself so freely to win.

Then there was the private life, insofar as it makes any sense to so describe something so relentlessly public. Warne was 23 when the Ball of the Century made him the most famous cricketer in the world, and for that title he vied in his time only with Sachin Tendulkar, with a naturally much larger audience.

In a game with a tendency to the prim and censorious, he was the soul of indiscretion, averse to calculation, sometimes evasive of consequences. He rendered the word “controversial” meaningless. He created new rules of celebrity engagement by being almost entirely unapologetic.

Shane Warne his former fiancee, British actress and model Liz Hurley. Picture: AFP

Yet despite our frequent qualms about celebrity, Warne proved an excellent advertisement for renown. He lived large; he lived lush; he embraced all the fun and opportunity that attention offered, always with the possibility it would not end well. He sometimes craved privacy but never seclusion. In some ways, he seemed to normalise fame, seeming by it to be quite unaffected.

And whatever was happening in his life, there was always cricket. He quit at or near his peak. There was no tailing off; there was no equivalent of the awkward twilight of Borg or the late fights of Ali. He played just one Test match after that epic Boxing Day in 2006 in front of his own fans, where he became the first Australian to 700 Test wickets. He even acted as a transitional figure in the rise of T20 by captaining Rajasthan Royals to the inaugural Indian Premier League. Simply to utter “Warnie” was to commune in a celebration of cricket’s good fortune in having him; in any conversation involving him, a smile was never far away.

There will now be no old age for him either, against which he would surely have chafed. He has departed while the memory of him is fresh and green, and while the consensus remains that, no, there will never be another Warne. One was quite extraordinary enough.

Listen to Peter Lalor and Gideon Haigh discussing the life and career of Shane Warne in The Australian's podcast Cricket, Et Cetera