THERE IS SURELY no more enigmatic skill in all of sport than leg-spin bowling. To be a “leggie” a cricketer does not need the lithe athleticism of a fast bowler, capable of hurling a ball at a cowering batsman at 140km an hour. Nor can he rely on the monotony of the off-spinner, whose trade depends on landing the ball in the same spot, time after time, spinning the ball just enough to dissuade the batsman from taking a risk against him. Rather, leg-spinners are cricket’s magicians. Often erratic, but able to spin the ball viciously and in either direction. If fast bowlers terrify, leg-spinners bamboozle.
Of all who have attempted to master this most difficult of arts, Shane Warne, who died aged just 52 on March 4th, was the finest in the modern game’s near-150-year history. Mr Warne took 708 Test wickets for Australia between 1992 and 2007, at the time the most that any bowler had claimed. Brash, bleach-haired and beer-bellied, he was not the archetypal sportsman. But he could control a cricket ball as if it were a marionette dancing on a string.
Consider Mr Warne’s first ball in a Test (five-day) match in England, against Australia’s old enemy. It is perhaps the most famous delivery in the history of the game. It came in 1993, at Old Trafford in Manchester. Ambling up to bowl, Mr Warne drifted the ball several feet to the left of the batsman’s legs—so wide, in fact, that the hapless striker, Mike Gatting, merely peered at it disdainfully. To his horror the ball then spat across him, knocking the top of his off stump. Mr Gatting, one of England’s finest batsmen of the time, could be seen after play had finished staring at the pitch, trying to work out just how far the ball had spun.
The perplexed aftermath of that dismissal would have pleased Mr Warne as much as the act itself, for he loved the psychology of the game. To him, dominating a batsman was as much about getting into his mind as bowling an unplayable delivery. Before every series, it seemed, he would invent a new, “magic” delivery. It was not enough that he possess the most potent leg-break in the game (the ball that spits from right to left). Or that his “googly” (which turns the opposite way) was unreadable. Or indeed that he had a destructive top-spinner. He also threw down “flippers”—which, with a click of the fingers, skidded straight on off the pitch. And “zooters”, which no one seemed to be able to define.
But the mind games were nothing without Mr Warne’s remarkable skill and dexterity. For those who have never considered cricket’s greatest art, pick up your nearest spherical object. Imagine bowling it with your right arm—elbow straight—and getting the ball to spin viciously from right to left, with a snap of the wrist, the ball flicked behind the forefingers. Now imagine being able to bowl it out of the back of your hand, so the ball spins in the opposite direction, from left to right—without the batsman being able to pick up on the change of action.
It was the mastery of such a seemingly impossible skill that, to cricket-mad Australians, made Mr Warne perhaps the most celebrated sporting figure of the past 50 years. But it was not only the athletic talent. They also admired the keen, analytical brain that afterwards propelled him into the commentary box and into coaching gigs around the world. And, perhaps most of all, they loved the “sledging”—the foul-mouthed and cocky tirades he would hurl at batsmen. It was, he said, never done out of spite, but rather out of a belief that any way he could unsettle an opponent was fair game. With such mastery over a cricket ball, he scarcely needed it. But it was all part of the art: scrambling a batsman’s brains before triumphantly skewing his stumps.