Paul Lewis: The soap opera life of Shane Warne - cricket's best-ever bowler

OPINION:

If you think about it, Shane Warne's death at 52 fitted the script of what even he called his soap opera of a life – in which he became, I believe, the best bowler cricket has ever seen.

If he was the boy who never grew up, "Warney" was loved by Australian cricket fans for that exact reason – a Peter Pan of a cricketer whose talent could make his Australian team fly high.

If he wasn't exactly an intellectual genius, he still had overflowing chutzpah. Four days before his death, he created typical Warney headlines by saying he wanted to become head coach of England after their embarrassing Ashes loss to Australia – an appointment about as likely as Vladimir Putin heading the Save The Children fund.

There were scandals galore – banned from cricket for taking a forbidden diuretic, Warney somehow managed to endear himself by alleging his mum had bought it to help him shed the chubbiness which saw him baited by opposing fans. There was the hair transplant, the shiny new teeth, cosmetic surgery, the women – always the women – and text messaging scandals.

His dubious amorous pursuits earned him a song, written by Kevin Bloody Wilson, and which contained the immortal refrain: "Warney, keep your wanger in your pants" – a very Australian kind of salute, that...

Shane Warne famously dated British actress Liz Hurley for several years. Photo / Getty

He also released a steady stream of daft statements. One was his re-working of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution on TV reality show I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. Warney disputed that humans evolved from monkeys, saying we may be descended from aliens - because evolved monkeys couldn't possibly have built the pyramids.

But let's park all the ancillary stuff. Where he achieved adult status was on the pitch. What a bowler. What a genius in that sphere. Best I've ever seen. Better than the great Hadlee, Lillee, Holding, and better than the man who sits atop him by nearly 100 wickets on cricket's all-time stats, Muttiah Muralitharan.

There's no sight in cricket quite like a leg spinner running through his bag of tricks. The art of good leg spin is deceit; each ball delivered looks the same but performs differently. It's a game of chess, an art on the very edge of control, an intricacy of flight and subtle adjustments of wrist and fingers.

Leg spin requires a grip on the ball just about physically impossible for most of us. Warne said once he felt his talent was partly an accident of birth – that his hands were shaped perfectly for leg spin. The bowler must hold the ball in a way for which the hand was not designed; must release the ball at precisely the right moment and with precisely the right amount of work on it and with precisely the right amount of flight. It is almost a science.

Shane Warne smokes a cigarette in the Australian cricket team dressing room. Photo / Getty

It's no idle boast to say Warne saved leg spin from dying out. Former Australian opener and commentator Bill Lawry claimed in 1991 there was no place in modern cricket for leg spinners. Six months later, along came Warney and the ball that dismissed England's Mike Gatting. It is the single most famous ball delivered in cricket (the underarm is next...), a vicious spinning grenade of a ball which pitched so far outside the stumps that Gatting thought it could not possibly hit them.

Back in 2005, I was transfixed by Warne's display against Pakistan. He'd gone through a slump after injuries and surgery to shoulder and fingers. He couldn't bowl his "flipper" any more (a faster, skidding ball) and his wrong 'un (turns the opposite way to what the batter expects) was a shadow of the fizzing, nasty thing that fooled many.

So he reinvented himself. He somehow tightened up control of his already well-controlled deliveries, rarely bowling a bad ball. He invented a "slider", a straight ball that goes into the pads but which looks like a leg spinner, and a "zooter" - a front-of-the-hand ball that uses backspin and also traps the batsman in front of his wickets or promotes a miscue.

Against Pakistan, he was 36 then and supposedly ending his career. But he still had that huge appetite for wickets. More, always more. He had a lean and hungry look when bowling, expecting a wicket with every ball; a shark circling a seal.

Shane Warne celebrates a wicket against Pakistan in 2005. Photo / Getty

He was the first to reach 700 test wickets and, in this critic's view, should be sitting on top of cricket's list of "Most wickets in a career". That Muralitharan fills that spot is the doing of the ICC – faced with having to re-write the record books because of Murali's suspect action, they reprehensibly chose to re-write the law book instead, basically pardoning the Sri Lankan.

Murali's 800 wickets thus have a great big asterisk mentally appended to them; Warne's 708 don't. Murali took 166 wickets against then minnows Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, Warne 17.

His gone-too-soon passing won't enshrine him as the best bowler statistically but, for many of us, Shane Keith Warne will be the best there ever was. He was that good.