Shane Keith Warne is an Australian
former international cricketer widely regarded as one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the game. In 2000, he
was selected by a panel of cricket experts as one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Century,
the only specialist bowler selected in the quintet and the only one still
playing at the time. He is also a cricket commentator and a professional poker
player.
Warne played his
first Test match
in 1992, and took over 1000 international wickets (in Tests and One-Day
Internationals), second to this milestone after Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan. Warne's 708 Test
wickets was the record for the most wickets taken
by any bowler in Test cricket, until it was also broken by Muralitharan on 3
December 2007. A useful lower-order batsman, Warne also scored over 3000 Test
runs, and he holds the record for most Test runs without a century. His career
was plagued by scandals off the field; these included a ban from cricket for
testing positive for a prohibited substance, charges of bringing the game into
disrepute by accepting money from bookmakers,
and sexual indiscretions.
As well as the Australian National Cricket Team,
he also played Australian domestic cricket for his home state of Victoria, and English domestic cricket for
Hampshire. He was captain of Hampshire for
three seasons, from 2005 to 2007.
He retired from
international cricket in January 2007, at the end of Australia's 5–0 Ashes series victory over England. Three other players integral to
the Australian team at the time, Glenn McGrath,
Damien Martyn
and Justin Langer,
also retired from Tests at the same time which led some, including the
Australian captain, Ricky Ponting, to declare it the "end of
an era".
When
Warne likened his life to a soap opera he was selling himself short. His story
was part fairytale, part pantomime, part hospital drama, part adult's-only
romp, part glittering awards ceremony. He took a Test hat-trick, won the
Man-of-the-Match prize in a World Cup final and was the subject of seven books.
He was the first cricketer to reach 700 Test wickets. He swatted more runs than
any other Test player without making a hundred, and was probably the wiliest
captain Australia never had. His ball that gazoodled Mike Gatting in 1993,
bouncing outside leg stump and cuffing off, is unanimously esteemed the most
famous in history. He revived legspin, thought to be extinct, and is now
pre-eminent in a game so transformed that we sometimes wonder where the next
champion fast bowlers will come from.
For
all that, Warne's greatest feats are perhaps those of the last couple of years
of his career. Returning in 2004 from a 12-month hiatus for swallowing
forbidden diuretics, he swept aside 26 Sri Lankan batsmen in three Tests, and
the following year scalped a world record 96 victims - a stunning 24 more than
in his show-stopping 1993 - and still missed out on the Allan Border Medal.
Forty of those were Englishmen in what sometimes appeared to be a lone stand in
a thrilling Ashes series. At the end he was helped by his stockpile of straight
balls: a zooter, slider, toppie and back-spinner, one that drifted in, one that
sloped out and another that didn't budge. Yet he seldom got his wrong'un right
and rarely landed his flipper. More than ever he relied on his two oldest
friends: excruciating accuracy and an exquisite legbreak, except that he
controlled the degree of spin - and mixed it - at will. Like the great
classical painters, he stumbled upon the art of simplicity. His bowling was
never simpler, nor more effective, nor lovelier to look at.
Following his
retirement from international cricket, Warne played a full season at Hampshire
in 2007. He had been scheduled to appear in the 2008 English cricket season,
but in late March 2008 he announced his retirement from playing first-class cricket in order to be able to
spend more time pursuing interests outside of cricket. In March 2008, Warne
signed to play in the Indian Premier League for the Jaipur team, Rajasthan
Royals in the first edition of the tournament, where he played the
roles of both captain and coach. He led his team to victory against the Chennai Super Kings in a cliffhanger of a final
match on 1 June 2008.
0 comments:
Post a Comment