LAWRENCE BOOTH: Shane Warne was tugging at everyone's heart-strings

No country, not even India, celebrates its cricketing greats quite like Australia.

In 1915, around 250,000 turned out in Sydney to bid farewell to Victor Trumper, the Golden Age batting great who had died at 37 from Bright’s disease. In 2001, the streets of Adelaide filled to say goodbye to Sir Don Bradman. In 2014, the death of Phillip Hughes — killed by a short-pitched delivery in a state game — prompted emotional scenes in his home town of Macksville, New South Wales.

For Shane Warne, who suffered a heart attack earlier this month at the age of 52, a state memorial service was a given.

The question was how to do him justice. And the answer came on a beautifully judged night at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where Warne once took an Ashes hat-trick — as well as his 700th Test wicket — and where the vast Southern Stand has been renamed in his honour.

After poignant, humorous, raucous and emotional turns, the evening lacked only the presence of Warne himself.

Except he wasn’t really missing at all. Warne was everywhere, tugging at everyone’s heartstrings. As his father, Keith, put it: ‘We are grateful the world loved our son as we did.’

For the cricket community, Warne’s status was assured long ago. He was the man who first saved leg-spin, then helped make Australia one of the greatest Test teams of all time.

But what also emerged in front of a crowd of 50,000 was a natural magnetism that sucked others, from far beyond the boundary, into his orbit.

There were musical tributes from Sir Elton John, Chris Martin, Robbie Williams and Ed Sheeran, and a well-observed insight from the Australian actor Hugh Jackman, who reckoned Warne ‘sucked the marrow out of life’. 

There was even a bit of Bradman, whose grand-daughter Greta,