Shane Warne: Giant of cricket who was one of sport’s great entertainers

With his Baywatch persona, bleached blond locks, ear stud, shades and a permanent suntan, one eye silvery grey, the other greeny blue, Shane Warne was one of the finest cricketers of his generation. While thrilling spectators and invariably upsetting the cricketing administrators, as an entertainer as much as a sportsman, he undoubtedly helped rescue Test-match cricket from the doldrums and turn it into the multimillion-pound industry it is today. Single-handedly too, he revitalised the fast-disappearing art of leg-spin bowling, an achievement later acknowledged when Wisden named him as one of their five cricketers of the 20th century.

Few who witnessed it will surely ever forget the first ball he sent down against England at Old Trafford in the summer of 1993. Seemingly drifting down the leg side for four byes, it suddenly curled inwards towards the leg stump before eventually clipping the top off. It left batsman Mike Gatting a somewhat bemused bystander and went on to be dubbed “the ball of the century”. Surprisingly it was not Warne’s favourite.

Instead he chose the one in Sydney that spun even further to defeat the West Indies’ Shivnarine Chanderpaul. Indeed few batsmen rarely fully mastered Warne, the exception perhaps being India’s Sachin Tendulkar. Always an attacking bowler both physically and psychologically, surprisingly sparing in his use of the googly, Warne enjoyed far more success with a quicker ball that hurried on.

Born in the Melbourne suburb of Ferntree Heights, Shane Keith Warne was initially educated at Hampton High School. As a youngster he broke both his legs in an accident, being forced to push himself around in a cart that his father made for him. He would always maintain that it was this that