Shane Warne

Profile

As a chubby, blond haired leg spinner bowling on his debut on a not so conducive Sydney pitch, and been hit by Ravi Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar for a barrage of runs, Shane Warne would have probably wondered whether that was going to be his last Test for a long time. Luckily, the selectors decided to give Warne another chance, and the rest, as they say, is history. 144 Tests and 194 ODIs later, the man has almost seen it all. Success, a rare failure against the Indians, controversies, fame and a lot of money, but one thing that Shane Warne would always regret is that his off field antics ensured that the Test captaincy was never going to be his.Warne became the first ever bowler to pick 700 Test wickets; that however, was just a statistic. The more interesting part was the way he went about plotting the downfall of the batsmen, outwitting and out thinking them into submission. Mike Gatting received what they later called the ball of the century, and for years after that, the Pommies treated Warne as if he was a ticking bomb, waiting to explode. However, like any great cricketer, Warne had one Achilles Heel, and that was in the form of Sachin Tendulkar, for whom he once famously claimed that he had nightmares of Tendulkar dancing down the wicket and hitting him for six. He also had his shares of off field controversies, with women, book makers, diet pills and bans, so much that the ACB decided not to award him the captaincy after Steve Waugh’s retirement. All in all, Shane Warne was one entertainer, whose biggest strength was to almost rewrite destiny with his art, the art of leg spin bowling.

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Career

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