In its pre-Ashes trails, BBC’s Radio 5 has been re-playing a clip of commentary by cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew from fifteen or so years ago. It makes the hairs on the neck of this cricket-lover bristle each time it’s played in.
The year was 1993, and it was the first Test Match of the series against Australia at Manchester’s Old Trafford ground – which sadly will not feature in this year’s contests. Back then we’d all heard just a little about a young man called Shane Warne, still relatively new to the Australian side. We knew he was rated highly, and that after a slow start in Test Match cricket he’d begun to take wickets. We could now see that, if a tad on the porky side, he had a fashionable laddish demeanour, complete with trendy haircut, and a knowing, teasing smile. We were curious to know just how good he was.
Agnew describes Warne’s first ball to the English batsman Mike Gatting, then in the twilight of a distinguished career. In fact it’s Warne’s very first ball in Ashes cricket. Warne takes only a few steps to the crease, and he bowls. Agnew thinks at first that the ball has taken Gatting on the pad, and then reports, clearly astonished, that Gatting has been clean-bowled. Quite quickly this moment became known as the ‘ball of the century’.
What happened was this. Like Shahid Afridi in the previous blog, Warne is a leg-spinner, but the methods of the two men are very different. Warne is shorter than Afridi, and bowls more slowly, often throwing the ball up above the batsman’s eyeline. A typical Warne delivery might come at the batsman between 49 and 53 miles per hour. When you consider that a second serve in professional men’s tennis will still register 90 or 100 miles per hour, you can get a feel for the pace of Warne’s bowling. The point is that there’s time for doubt to register in the batsman’s mind, as the ball comes down.
Like most leg-spinners, Warne bowls from the back of the hand. This requires strong and flexible wrists and fingers, and has the great virtue of disguise. The amount of torque applied to the ball can be varied, and depending on the angle at which the wrist is rotated the direction of spin can change too. This sounds counter-intuitive at first, but experiment and you’ll see how it could be so. The batter needs to watch very carefully as the ball leaves the bowler’s hand, and may take other cues from the bowler’s arm movement or approach to the crease, but even so she may find it very hard to ‘pick’ whether the ball will turn away from her, or into her, or if the wrist has gone right over the top, over-spinning the ball, she may find the ball hurrying off the pitch awkwardly when it bounces.
I don’t know that there will have been many spin bowlers in the history of the game who have spun the ball more than Warne. You hear people talk about Clarrie Grimmett, George Tribe and other greats of the past, and sometimes they make it sound as if such ability was routine ‘back then’. The best I can say is that Shane Warne is unique in the last fifty years. It’s a guess, but he’s probably the finest spin bowler the sport has ever seen. Like many that were to follow over the next fifteen years, the ball which did for Gatting, was spun hard, and because it was spun hard it drifted in the air towards and then outside Gatting’s pads. When it hit the pitch, outside the leg stump, the ball bit into the turf and turned back in behind the batsmen maybe a foot and a half, to hit the middle and off stumps. The wicketkeeper, Ian Healy, was fooled as much as the batsman: he was still expecting to take the ball down the leg-side. Hearing the clatter of the wood behind him, Gatting stood transfixed, unable to believe what had just happened. In other circumstances his attitude might have been interpreted as dissent. In fact it was just shock. And a legend was born.
As the series progressed, and during subsequent series, we learned a lot more about the Warne repertoire, which never made him any easier to play. His googly (the ball which turns the opposite way from normal) was never spun very much, but in his early days was still an effective weapon. As time went on, and his craft took toll of his shoulder, the googly became less obvious. So did the ‘slider’, his much faster, flatter ball, which in those early days accounted for many of his wickets. Four things supported him throughout his career. The first was his enviable accuracy for a bowler of his type. Loose balls just didn’t seem to happen. He was ‘at’ the batsman all the time, and there was never a loosening of the stranglehold. The second was his reputation. In particular English batsmen never ever recovered from that ‘Gatting moment’. At times they were completely strokeless and clueless against him. Each series he played, he claimed to have invented yet another new variation or two, but the chances are this was mostly smoke and mirrors. More important was his ability to out-think the batsmen he played against. The third thing was Warne’s relentless, cheery aggression. Every ball bowled was apparently carefully considered before and after delivery. There would be talk to the batsmen, of a bantering but undermining nature. He never once lost his head on the cricket field, even if occasional antics off it attracted the attention of the press. Fourthly he had an excellent team around him, often great players in their own right. He got many wickets for other bowlers, as batsmen relaxed, glad not to be facing the demon Warne for once.
I never tired of watching him, even when he was helping Australia beat us yet again. He toured England four times, and this year he’ll be missing, though no doubt omnipresent in the commentary box. Who knows, he may give us a sound-byte or two of his own for posterity…
