Shane Warne obituary

Shane Warne, who has died aged 52 of a suspected heart attack, was almost certainly the greatest spin bowler cricket has ever produced. More than that, he was one of the most outsize personalities of any sport. Everything he did in his game and his life was on a grand scale: he lived fast and, it transpires, died young.

Warne singlehandedly revived the discipline of leg-spin, which by the time he burst into Test cricket in the 1990s was almost a lost art. He arrived into an Australia team that had already embarked on a run of eight Ashes series wins and made it overwhelmingly stronger – he was still in the business of terrorising Englishmen when he retired from Test cricket 14 years later.

Spin bowlers in his era, certainly English ones, often found themselves apologetic figures brought on to give a little breather to the fast men, who had begun to dominate the sport, certainly outside Asia. Warne was the reverse: he was not just a master of his craft; he commanded the arena.

He made that clear from the first ball he bowled in an Ashes Test, to Mike Gatting at Old Trafford: “Two-thirds of the way down the pitch the ball dipped into the leg-side, opening Gatting up like a can of beans, before ripping diagonally across his body to clip the outside of off-stump,” wrote Mike Selvey in the Guardian. “Gatting stood his ground, not in dissent or disappointment but in total, utter disbelief.”

At the time some called it the Ball from Hell. As time went by it was sanctified as the Ball of the Century.

Warne was born and brought up in the Melbourne suburbs, the son of Bridgette, who had come to Australia aged three, and Keith. He was not remotely academic but at 15 he won a sports scholarship to Mentone grammar school which, he