Page 106 - IPL1

W

arne was the only non-Indian to captain one of the
eight franchises, but then he always did like to be different. Ever
since he emerged on the Test scene as a slightly overweight,
bleached-blond with a stud in his ear and an attitude to match,
it was clear Warne was not going to be your average cricketer.
By the time he retired from international cricket 15 years later,
he had single-handedly rewritten the record books, taking 708
Test wickets – then a record – at the remarkable average for a
leg-spinner of 25.41, and a further 293 in one-day internationals.
Controversy was rarely far away, never more so than when he
was sent home from the 2003 World Cup after failing a drugs
test, but he never lost the charisma that made him the greatest
box-office pull of his generation and reinvented the dying art of
leg-spin.

But there were moments at the start of his career when the
Australian selectors must have wondered whether they had
made a mistake. In his first Test, against India at Sydney on
January 1992, Warne took one for 150 and was hit all round the
CAPTAIN
park by Ravi Shastri, who made 206 before providing Warne with
his first Test wicket, and Sachin Tendulkar, who contributed a
sublime 148. If that was an unyielding welcome to the game at
the highest level, things got worse before they got better and in
his next three Test innings, against India and then in Sri Lanka,
Warne took no wicket for 185 runs.

Warne
Shane
Then it changed. With Australia tenaciously trying to defend a
target of 181 to beat Sri Lanka in Colombo, their captain Allan
Border threw the ball to Warne more in hope than expectation
and watched in delight as his young leggie took three for 11 to
help the Aussies to a memorable 16-run win. A haul of seven for
52 against West Indies later that year in Melbourne confirmed
his performance in Sri Lanka was no fluke, and he followed that
up with 17 wickets in three Tests against New Zealand, but his
defining moment was yet to come. Trundling in at Old Trafford
in June 1993 to bowl his first delivery in an Ashes Test, Warne
bamboozled Mike Gatting with what immediately became
known as the Ball of the Century – a leg-break that turned so
far from outside Gatting’s leg-stump to clip the top off that the
batsman stood momentarily rooted to the spot. It was official:
here was a bowler with the potential to be an all-time great.