The musical sonority of Australia’s illustrious wicket-keeper Ian Healy’s one-liner, “Well bowled, Shane,” reverberates in the mind and the ear—when you think of Australian cricket. It’s just enough to send the batsman, the non-striker, and the opposition, into a wobbly tizzy, just as much the crowd into a dizzy frenzy.
This was the magic of Shane Warne—whose untimely adieu, at age 52, has sent the cricketing world into gloom.
The greatest, it is often said, are eccentric. Or, is it the genii? Warne was no exception to the everlasting aphorism. He could make the ball talk in a language of its own.
The fact also remains that the internal physics and chemistry of leg-spin bowling is a verse, beautified with song, where only a select few in the art reach a state of buoyancy and wish-fulfilment. Leg-spin bowling is a subtle art that cannot, like all creative pursuits, be forced on the unwilling mind. Its elements of ‘commands’ should be presented always in childhood, as a sort of amusement to augment one’s natural bent of acquisition—for the difficult craft to develop, and, thereafter, attain its fruition. Warne exemplified this credo like no other—before, or after him.
All great leg-spinners, through history, have been outstanding paradigms of a leg-spin ordained‘rearing.’Warne typified the tenet. His expanded human abilities for leg-spin bowling were far beyond the confines of any physical evolution theory. His art, or guile, was a ground-breaking perestroika—a metaphorical out-of-body (OBE) experience.
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