He will be the great ‘absent friend’ of this Ashes, a man who would have lit up the series on the field with his box-office ability or in the commentary box with his no-nonsense views.
When Shane Warne died more than three and a half years ago, cricket lost one of the greatest bowlers who ever lived and one of the biggest personalities the game has known.
The facts tell you Warne took 708 wickets in 145 Tests and reinvigorated what had become the dying art of bowling leg-spin, becoming the biggest star in one of the greatest of all Australian sides from the early 1990s through to his retirement at the start of 2007.
But Shane Keith Warne was so much more than statistics.
He transcended his sport like few other cricketers and crammed more into his 52 years and 172 days than most do in much longer lifetimes.
He had his flaws and led a life full of colour that included controversy on and off the field — he was once banned for a year after testing positive for banned diuretics — before his premature death from a suspected heart attack while holidaying in Thailand. But he was a sporting genius.
Shane Warne and Mark Waugh during the 2001 Ashes (Laurence Griffiths/ALLSPORT)
It is at Ashes time that the loss of Warne is most acutely felt because he was at the centre of the oldest rivalry in cricket throughout his career, taking a record 195 wickets against England and featuring in seven series wins for Australia.
From the moment he announced himself in Ashes cricket by bowling Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993 with the ‘ball of the century’ to his retirement in Sydney 14 years later having helped inspire a 5-0 thrashing, Warne was the Ashes.
“He was the biggest superstar of the lot,” Mark Waugh, Warne’s friend and team-mate throughout most of Australia’s golden period, tells The Athletic.
“His record will tell you that not only was he a great competitor, he was a great showman as well. He loved to win and he loved beating England.
“It goes back to that first ball against Gatting, which was just freakish, then the hat-trick in Melbourne (in 1994), and when Australia beat England in Adelaide in 2006. It looked sure to be a draw and he just knocked over four wickets on the last day.
“He was just a fantastic bowler and he had the wood on so many English players. He just mesmerised them and dominated against England.”
#OnThisDay in 1993, @ShaneWarne did this at Old Trafford…
The ball of the century. 👊
Limited Ashes tickets remain ➡️ https://t.co/vAwSfM6JnG pic.twitter.com/i5b3KYBwBM
— Lancashire Cricket (@lancscricket) June 4, 2019
Waugh had a close-up view of Warne’s skill as one of the greatest close fielders the game has known. “I remember fielding at silly mid-off and never felt he would bowl a bad ball and I would be in danger of getting hit,” says Waugh.
“And when I was at slip to him, I was always in the game. He would always give you opportunities by finding the edge. He just never bowled any bad balls.
“He just had that knack of getting big wickets. Even if he wasn’t at his best, he’d pretend he was and batsmen would freeze against him.”
A perplexed Mike Gatting wonders how he has been bowled by Warne’s ‘ball of the century’ at Old Trafford in 1993 (PA Images via Getty Images)
Mike Hussey only played with Warne towards the end of his illustrious career, but he left an indelible mark on a batter who, after his debut in 2005, would go on to become another of Australia’s modern greats, averaging 51.52 in his 79 Tests.
“Shane was the greatest player I ever saw,” Hussey tells The Athletic. “It was not just his skill — he was a magician.
“How he would set batsmen up and how he would make them think he would get them out in one way and then get them out in a completely different way.
“To be in the middle watching him go about his work was unbelievable. Some of the mind games he played with batsmen… he was one of the great competitors. I feel very lucky to have played with him. His life ended too short and we miss him dearly, but those of us who played with him were very fortunate to be in the same team.”
Hussey’s first Ashes — and Warne’s last — remains particularly memorable.
“The 2006-07 series is my favourite Ashes, without a doubt,” adds Hussey. “I’d never seen a team more focused and more determined to do well after what happened in 2005 (when Australia lost 2-1 to England, their first defeat against the old enemy since 1986-87). Warney was integral to that and the way it panned out (Australia winning 5-0) was pretty special.”
Yet, while Warne relished beating England, he had just as big an influence on the English game, particularly while captaining Hampshire between 2004 and 2007. Not least on Rob Key, who became one of his closest friends and is now trying to plot Australia’s Ashes downfall as managing director of the England team.
“When I first came across Shane, I was playing for Kent and he was at Hampshire and I couldn’t wait to face him,” Key tells The Athletic. “I thought: ‘I’m going to be telling people about this for the rest of my life’. It was just such an experience, particularly being at the other end watching him bowl to Rahul Dravid (the great India batter).
“I am a cricket badger (obsessed with the sport) and I could just watch Shane captain a side. I used to enjoy sitting there watching him set fields and seeing how he did everything. And I discovered he was a cricket badger, too, because he loved the game so much.
“If you asked him about cricket, he would talk to you forever about it. He loved talking about the game, loved the fact you would ask him about it, and I just picked his brains. I could ring him up and ask him for anything and he would do it. He was incredible.
“He had great values. If you scored runs against him, he would be the first person to come up and say well done. We saw it with Kevin Pietersen at the Oval in the famous last Test in 2005. He would sledge you, do whatever he could to get you out, but he’d be the first person to clap when you got to 50.”
Shane Warne after taking the wicket of Alec Stewart at the Gabba in 2002 (Nick Wilson/Getty Images)
Warne is still having an impact on England now. The ‘Bazball’ style of play they hope will lead to an Ashes upset came directly from his playbook. England are, literally, trying to beat Australia at their greatest player’s own game.
“He influenced me and Baz (England coach Brendon McCullum) and we still raise a glass to Warney whenever we win a game,” says Key. “We say: ‘He would have enjoyed that one’ .The decisions I’ve made in this job come from Shane being one of the most influential people in my life.
“Shane always kept the game moving forward. Ben Stokes is just like him. You always think that if you ask great people something, you have to take notes and walk away with 20 sheets of A4 paper, but actually, it was very simple with him.
“He’d just say: ‘How are you getting this bloke out?’. Not worry about how many fielders you might have on the boundary. He understood how to make a team successful and he knew how to make bowlers believe they could get a wicket.
“He would always think about how a team could win from any position and he never, ever gave up. He had an ability to make his bowlers feel 10ft tall and he also had the ability to make you, as a batter, think: ‘What’s he doing now? What’s he up to?’.
“Warney just understood mentality, so when his team were behind and maybe having to bat out a day and a half chasing 500, he would say: ‘We’re going for them’. Not because he thought they could get there, but because he thought the best way to survive was looking to be positive, looking to score, and to be proactive.
“He knew if you went out there and tried to block every ball, it would become a siege and the opposition would swarm around you and you’d make a mistake.”
For every story about Warne’s impact on the field, there is another about his personality and the smiles he brought to those around him.
“I remember one time in Antigua when both of us weren’t playing during a Test against West Indies,” Jason ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie, another of Warne’s Australian team-mates from the halcyon days, tells The Athletic. “At that time, Shane had a contract with Nicorette (chewing gum that stops cravings for cigarettes) and wasn’t supposed to be smoking.
“I came back to the changing room after running drinks and saw a plume of smoke above a toilet stall, a pair of bare feet, and cigarette ash on the floor. I said: ‘King (we always called him king), are you in there? Are you having a ciggy?’.
“He said: ‘Ah, no mate, I’m just reading a book’. It was funny not only because you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out he was smoking, but also because I never saw him read a book!”
Jason Gillespie congratulates Shane Warne on taking his 500th Test wicket (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)
Former England coach David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd became close to Warne when his second career as a commentator brought him to the Sky TV box.
“He knew so many people from so many walks of life,” Lloyd tells The Athletic. “There was this one time I had a contract with Specsavers opticians that earned me five pairs of glasses.
“One of them had a little purple tint that Shane took a shine to. I said to him: ‘They’re my Kylie Minogues. They’re autographed and everything’.
“So what does he do? He rings Kylie immediately and tells her to turn the telly on and watch the geezer who’s talking now because he’s wearing a pair of your glasses.
“She then says: ‘Where does he live?’ to Shane and sends me a lovely hand-written letter and a bottle of pink Champagne, saying thanks very much. That was Kylie Minogue!”
The friendship Warne and Key developed in county cricket continued in the commentary box and on to the golf course.
“I lived two hours from where we played golf together,” says Key. “So I would be trying to juggle things like family to get away to play a round — he was over here working with Sky on his own, so it was easier for him.
“I’d tell Fleur (Key’s wife) I was working or had to do an interview because it was easier to lie than say I was playing golf with Shane Warne, so I’d get up at 5am, get there for 7am, and the first thing he’d say was: ‘Do you want to play tomorrow?’.
“I’d say: ‘Can’t we just get through today first, mate?’. But he was always living life at a thousand miles an hour and always thinking about what came next.
“He would host us at a spectacular course and he would always end up paying. You couldn’t pay a penny. And if he was just a couple of minutes late, he would apologise.”
Shane Warne and David Lloyd commentating together at the 2015 World Cup (Hagen Hopkins-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)
Warne’s name is living on now through a charity set up by his friends and family to try to prevent others from suffering the way he did.
“It was always at Shane’s core to make a difference,” Helen Nolan, CEO of The Shane Warne Legacy, tells The Athletic. “After he passed away, Andrew Neophitou (a friend and one of his managers) thought: ‘It can’t end like this, he had too much of an impact in life’.
“Heart disease doesn’t discriminate. Too often it takes those we love far too soon and that’s what happened with Shane. One moment he was larger than life, the mate, father, son and brother and the cricketing legend we all knew, and the next he was gone. It was a devastating reminder that no one is invincible.
“But from that heartbreak, something powerful emerged and The Legacy has become the largest cardiometabolic health and risk screening project in Australia. It’s no exaggeration to say the free health checks provided have been life-changing. This is not just a tribute, it’s a lifeline.
“There are so many people, whether they knew him or not, who have shown so much love and respect for Shane since his passing and I wish he could have seen that.
“He copped a lot of negative press during his life and he would be the first to say that sometimes he deserved it, but this is balancing it out. A lot of people had no idea how much good he did in life because it was never reported, but this is keeping his memory alive in such a positive way. It’s making a tangible difference.”
Shane Warne bows to the crowd during his final Test match in 2007 (Mark Nolan/Getty Images)
And Warne’s presence will live on throughout the Ashes.
“The big misconception of Shane as a commentator was that he was one-eyed towards Australia and against England,” adds Key. “Actually, no. Yes, he was one-eyed, but it was towards a way of playing the game, a style and identity which was always positive and aggressive and looking to advance the game forward for a win.
“He didn’t care if you were Australia, England, Bangladesh or New Zealand. If you played in that style, he loved it. And if you didn’t, he couldn’t understand it. He was like: ‘Why on earth would you be that way?’. And that’s why he was so much fun to be around.
“He would have loved this Ashes series. Even though he would have been right behind the Australian team, I like to think he would have liked the way this England team will play, too. His influence even now is as great with us as it is Australia.
“His legacy lives on.”
