By Malcolm Conn
Victorian captain Simon O’Donnell roared at this tubby blond kid in the field as he struggled to retrieve the ball.
During his first outing in the Sheffield Shield as an uncertain 21-year-old, Shane Warne looked out of his depth.
Unathletic in the field, the newest addition to the Victorian team offered no sign of the spectacular career ahead of him. How could this kid have played football for the St Kilda under 19s?
Shane Warne before he made his Test debut in 1992.Credit: Archives
Warne’s bowling against Western Australia at St Kilda’s Junction Oval was tidy enough, but he didn’t look like getting anyone out.
Before the match Warne had been generous with his time as a photographer and I from The Australian, my employer at the time, went to the family home at Black Rock for a chat about his pending debut.
Confident for his age and experience, Warne was good company as he chatted with excitement about his pending debut.
He played just one late-season game, in February 1991, before appearing again next season. Three modest Shield matches later this tubby blond kid was in the Test team and the question remained, could he get anyone out?
His one wicket on debut against India in Sydney was Ravi Shastri, caught in the deep by Victorian teammate Dean Jones slicing a drive for 206. It was one more wicket that he claimed in Adelaide before being understandably dropped for the last Test in Perth.
On my next sighting of Warne in August 1992, ahead of a tour of Sri Lanka, this tubby kid was tubby no more.
“What have you been doing?” I said.
“A bit of walking,” he replied.
A bit of walking! He must have walked to the moon and back to change his shape like that. This was someone who looked serious about the next step.
But going into the last day of the first Test in Colombo, with a dominant Sri Lanka closing in on a shock victory, the question remained, could he get anybody out? His first innings figures were 0-107.
Warne had career figures of 1-335 when captain Allan Border rolled the dice and threw Warne the ball. In 5.1 overs Warne claimed 3-11, Australia claimed a remarkable victory to set up the series and yes, he could get people out.
Greg Matthews, the star of that Sri Lankan series, was Australia’s sole spinner when Australia failed to close out the first Test against the West Indies in Brisbane later that year.
“It’s time for Shane Warne,” said a frustrated Border after the match.
And so it was. In the second innings of the next Test in Melbourne Warne sent his “zooter” skidding under the bat of Richie Richardson on the way to 7-52 during the only Test Australia won in that tightly fought series.
In New Zealand he bamboozled arguably the best batsman in the world at the time, Martin Crowe, en route to 17 wickets at an average of 15 in three Tests.
So by the time Warne arrived in England during 1993 he was perfectly prime for THAT ball, the Ball of The Century, which dipped into Mike Gatting, spun past his probing blade, and crashed into the stumps.
Suddenly Warne was an overnight success more than two years in the making.
And with the new-found fame came the headlines.
“Warne is a lousy lover” screamed a tabloid which had found a girl he had spent time with on a previous sojourn as a club cricketer in England.
So appeared the two sides of Shane Warne, the unshakable iron will of possibly the best bowler who ever lived and the fragile ego which made him sensitive to anything which didn’t fit his view of the world.
He was sensitive about his weight to the point where he stormed out of the unveiling of his Madame Tussauds wax works statue in 1997 when a journalist asked him which figure he preferred.
And I was part of the media throng at Johannesburg airport when he was marched out of the 2003 World Cup after testing positive to a banned diuretic he was using for weight loss.
Yet none of this, or the countless other controversies and injuries which surrounded him, changed the fact that he was always the greatest.
It was almost as if the enforced break of a year-long drugs ban was a reawakening. The “King” reigned like never before. In 2005 he claimed a remarkable 96 wickets, including 40 on the Ashes tour, as he fought with ball and bat to keep Australia in a series they famously lost.
Warne retired at the peak of his game leaving us wanting more. He announced it ahead of the 2006 Boxing Day Test against England and then late on that first day bowled Andrew Strauss in front of almost 90,000 people, becoming the first man to 700 Test wickets.
“Whoever writes my scripts is doing an unbelievable job,” Warne said later.
Sadly there’s no final act. Thanks for the memories Warnie, we didn’t know how lucky we were.
Malcolm Conn covered most of Shane Warne’s career as a chief cricket writer.