20 great Ashes moments No1: Shane Warne's ball of the century, 1993

There shouldn’t really be anything left to say about Warne’s Ball, otherwise known as Shane Warne’s opening delivery in Ashes cricket; or more commonly as The Ball of the Century, Birth of A Superstar, Awakening of the Kraken, the Jailhouse Rock of Australia’s custard-blond leg-break Elvis, and so on ad infinitum.

In part this is simply because so much has already been said and written, an entire vast, groaning medieval library of ball talk, from the historian’s cold-eyed anatomy to the biographer’s partisan gurgles. And partly because the ball itself has become so enmeshed in its own mille-feuille of well-worn superlatives that there is a fear the moment itself has also become a cliche, a mini-industry of middle-aged hyperbole, asserting its own wonderfulness more insistently with each receding year. Perhaps Warne’s Ball might even have begun to look a bit like Warne himself these days: waxworked and framed, glistening with the acquired privilege of athletic celebrity and generally hanging around the place being oppressively eminent long after its own meaningful cricketing life has ended.

And yet this is not the case. Warne’s Ball, a hard-spun leg-break to dismiss Mike Gatting on the third day of the Old Trafford Test, is still jarringly fresh even as it approaches its 20th birthday this Ashes summer. Untarnished by its own celebrity, arteries still unfurred after two decades of richly sauced commemoration, Warne’s Ball remains a pure and entirely self-contained sporting miniature.

There may come a point – a thousand YouTube montages, a million lunch interval documentaries from now – where it is possible not to be startled by the impact of that drifting, leaping leg-break (and Gatting’s trudge: never underestimate