Shane Warne, preternatural genius who played with a carefree spirit

The first thing I did was watch that clip. Shut your eyes and you can probably picture it. Shane Warne’s first ball in the Ashes, his choppy peroxide blond hair ruffling in the wind, the zinc cream smeared across his lips and the tip of his nose, his top button undone, his collar turned up, a flash of the gold chain bouncing around his neck. Seven steps, then he sweeps his arm over, sends the ball flying. It dips, hits the pitch, zips, spins the width of Mike Gatting, clips the off-stump. Bowled him! Warne roars, Gatting baffled, stares back down the pitch trying to figure out what’s just happened, umpire Dickie Bird tries to hide the ghost of a smile that’s crept across his face.

It was some introduction. And it turned into some story, too.

Warne took more wickets for Australia than anyone, took more wickets in Ashes cricket than anyone, and took more in Test matches than anyone too, except for his mate, and rival, Muttiah Muralitharan. But those achievements aren’t why people around the world are mourning him now, and it’s not why they’ll remember him, either. You could try to measure his greatness in statistics, but they wouldn’t ever really begin to capture it. Instead, it’s in the memories he left us with, like that indelible moment at Old Trafford. It’s in the way he competed, and how he carried himself, his combination of high skill and low cunning, and how he matched his almost preternatural genius as a cricketer with the genuine, carefree air of a kid at play.

Warne wasn’t just one of the very greatest cricketers ever to play the game, picked in 2000 by a panel of 100 expert judges as one of the five greatest players of the 20th century, he was one of its biggest, brightest and boldest characters, too. The two