Disarmingly, Warne drew batsmen and us into his web of guile

When a friend called late on Friday evening to break the soul-shattering news, I silenced him with a few choice words, telling him that we were too old to play these silly games. The mind simply couldn’t wrap itself around the fact that Shane Warne was gone. At 52. How could he? How could he so cruelly, thoughtlessly, selfishly, leave so many behind so quickly, with such devastating consequences? Come on, Warney.

Shane Warne did that to you. Disarmingly, he drew you into his web of guile and cunning. He charmed you into believing he was gentle, harmless, a fun guy really. And then he tightened the noose. With a wicked grin, with a knowing look in the eye, with the unsaid message that he had conquered you.

But that was only on the cricket field, where that was what he was supposed to do. Off it? No way. Come on, Warney.

Warne made leg-spin fashionable. True, there was the eccentric Pakistan Abdul Qadir and the studious Anil Kumble, who made his Test debut a year and a half before the Victorian. They were extremely good, exceptional even, but they weren’t Warne. They were match-winners, but they weren’t showmen. They were artistes only with the cricket ball. Warne was an artiste on and off the field, a compelling mix of the unthinkable, the undoable, the ethereal and the should-not-do.

Before Warne and Kumble, leg-spin was a luxury. Both these men made it a permanent part of the cricketing landscape, the brick-and-mortar that it was never considered earlier. Kumble did it self-effacingly, Warne was in the face, brazen, mischievous.

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Warne made you want to pick up the cricket ball and give it a rip. He drove you to appeal long and hard, almost willing the umpire to rule in his favour when everyone and his grandmother knew there was no way the batsman was out. He took you on an emotional roller-coaster of feel-good and make-believe, fooling everyone – like all great magicians – in plain sight. He was magic. He was a genius. He was just Shane Warne, plain and simple.

How do mere mortals express appreciation of a God-given gift? What are those words, really, that do justice to the champion of wrists, to the control and command he had over his craft, to his mesmerising bag of tricks that drove grown men to putty?

Many of us took vicarious pleasure in Warne’s success. He became the beacon of hope for those who had to rely on guile and wits rather than bluster and bravado. You wanted to bowl like him but you couldn’t. But that was all right. No one else could, could they?

Were he still among us, Warne would be the first to shout from the rooftops that he wasn’t perfect, that he wasn’t a saint. And that was precisely his USP. For all his unalloyed sorcery, he was as human as anyone else, warts and all. Alongside Mark Waugh, he hid approaches by a bookie seeking pitch and weather information early in his career. More than a decade into bemusing batsmen, he exited the 2003 World Cup in shame after testing positive for a banned diuretic and obliquely pinning the blame on his mother who, he said, wanted him to lose weight. The occasional steamy dalliance hit the headlines. Remarkably, all of them made him more relatable. Touched as he might have been by the cricketing Gods, he was as frail and fragile as the next human and that made him a hit with the masses.

Warne’s metamorphosis from beach-blond, thickset, stud-bearing ‘Hollywood’ – a wonderfully appropriate early nickname – to the Sheikh of Tweak was a spectacularly undulating ride of heart-stopping twists and dramatic turns. A pasting at the hands of Ravi Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar on debut in Sydney in 1992 suggested he was more hype than substance, but in only his fifth Test, Warne dispelled that notion by bowling Australia to an improbable victory in Colombo.

But it was in June 1993 that he well and truly arrived, with the ‘Ball of the Century’. It was his first ball on English soil, a ball that turned two feet on pitching outside leg, a ball that spun viciously across Mike Gatting’s bat, a ball that smashed into off-stump. How fitting. It was a loud, screaming ball, but it was also a mellifluous, melodious ball. It was quintessential Shane Warne. If he hadn’t bowled again in Test cricket, it wouldn’t have mattered – his place in the pantheon was all but secured.

Warne didn’t worry about the pantheon. He left such mundane matters to the rest, focusing instead on reducing battle-hardened soldiers to blubbering wrecks. His strong fingers and supple wrist propelled the tiny little orb with such muted ferocity that batsmen didn’t fear damage to limb, only to wickets, reputations and egos and not necessarily in that order. Apart from India’s wonderfully nimble-footed batsmen whom he perennially found a bridge too far, Warne had the measure of the rest of the world, but because he killed them softly and charmed them to their doom, batsmen didn’t seem to mind being bested by the master.

In a shortlist of the best players not to lead their country in Test cricket, Warne’s name will hover right at the top. He wasn’t just an executioner; he was also a master strategist whose ticking brain helped him in more areas beyond bowling. It was his misfortune that Australia, like the rest of the world, was more fixated then on batsmen-captain, because few can parallel his leadership and man-management skills.

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Long after he had bowed out of Test cricket with 708 wickets – second only to Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800 – Warne roused a rag-tag bunch of relative no-hopers at Rajasthan Royals to mastermind a successful assault on the inaugural edition of the Indian Premier League. He was past his prime as a bowler, but it hardly showed. Revelling in the heady mix of cricket and entertainment, the showman turned on the charm yet again, successfully convincing his awed colleagues that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was well within their reach.

Now, Warne’s no more, though his legacy will endure such vicissitudes as death and heart attacks. But couldn’t he have waited a decade, a year, a month, a week, at least a day, before deciding the world had seen enough of him? Surely, he could have? Come on, Warney.