Shane Warne: Cricket shall always be very proud of its prodigal son

“I have lived in the moment and ignored the consequences. This has served me both well and painfully, depending on which moment. I’ve tried to live up to the legend, or the myth in my view, which has been a mistake because I’ve let life off the field become as public as life on it. In my defense, I’ve never pretended to be someone or something I’m not.” Shane Warne in the introduction of his autobiography ‘No Spin’.

You couldn’t disagree with the summarisation of his own character in such a brutally honest way. Warne can be accused of many things but never a pretender. He was indeed an Australian original or rather a cricket original. When he retired from Test cricket in January 2007 during the Ashes series after nearly 15 years of domination, he still managed to get 23 wickets!  When he took a five-wicket haul on the first day of the Boxing Test at his home ground in Melbourne and completed his 700th wicket, everyone was asking who was writing his script! Now, we can perhaps say that God wasn’t writing Warnie’s script or else he would not have taken him away so early from this planet when he still had so much to offer to cricket.

“Cricket will undoubtedly be poorer without Shane Warne. It was so difficult to digest this shocking news. I didn’t interact much with him or played much against him but that hardly mattered. Because we all wanted to watch him bowl, poetry in motion and he was a true magician and master of lateral thinking.” said former India opener Aakash Chopra.

“The subtlety and nuance he mastered on the field were not reflected off the field, where he lived fast and furious, hard and obvious. He would say what he wanted to say to whoever, whenever he liked; do what he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it; and let the devil take the hindmost,” wrote Sydney Morning Herald on its front-page early Saturday in Australia. However, it’s not his off the field deeds, world is going to remember in years to come. What will remain in everyone’s memory that a genius was born to bowl leg-spin who revived a dying art in such a fashion that even in the shortest formats of the game, captains are often thinking about playing two leggies in a playing XI. Warne not only revolutionised his art but changed the perception of leg-spin. “Yes, I’ve been silly at times but, equally, I like to think I’ve done justice to my talent, openly shared it with the world and provided plenty of entertainment,” wrote Warne in his autobiography with a remarkable candor.