Remembering Shane Warne and Rod Marsh: Australian cricket loses two great players… and even better blokes

When great sportsmen like Shane Warne and Rod Marsh fall, unexpectedly and before time as both men did from suspected heart attacks, their passing leaves a disbelief among the rest of us – as if their skills and fame might somehow protect them from life’s grim realities. Sadly, none are immune, though at least we have their spectacular deeds on a cricket field to remember them by – and they were spectacular.

Warne’s passing, at the age of 52, is especially shocking given his relative youth. Arguably the finest spin bowler of all time, he single-handedly made wrist-spin cool again after it had fallen from fashion. He did it in style, too, and after an indifferent start to his Test career he produced a moment people still talk about when he bowled Mike Gatting with his first ball in England at Old Trafford in 1991.

No ordinary ball, mind, but a leg-break which dipped and swerved to leg, due to the vicious spin imparted, pitched about six inches outside Gatting’s leg-stump and then spun back sharply across him to clip the off-bail.

It was a rip-snorter as Gatting’s bewildered expression showed, a delivery the papers quickly dubbed ‘the ball of the century,’ an accolade a more retiring personality might have struggled to live with given its occurrence so early on in a career. But Warney, as he was widely known, always played the game as if he had nothing to lose even when he did have, which set him apart from most of his team-mates as well as opponents.

His greatest asset as a bowler, and there were a few such as the strong fingers and wrists, was his accuracy. Wrist-spinners tend to put more revolutions on a cricket ball than other spinners, but the price they pay is greater inaccuracy. Not Warne, he ripped them hard but