Except, in the case of Shane Keith Warne, there is no true successor or heir, so the second part of that announcement is redundant.
No cricketer harnessed the magic of leg-spin bowling, understood the place cricket plays in life and took so much joy from each day he was given as Warne.
At 52, Warne is gone far too early, of a suspected heart attack, in Thailand, but there is no corner of the cricket world in which his passing will not be felt.
To watch Warne was to be sucked into a magical wonderland. Standing still at the top of his mark, taking a moment to size up the batsman and rerun the plan in his mind, Warne began his run up with a step that would not have been out of place in a park or on the beach. As he gathered momentum and approached the crease, every bowling muscle in his body was in alignment and when the ball left his hand, he had imparted all he could into giving it a rip.
But the physical beauty of Warne’s bowling was one part of his genius. He got into the heads of batsmen, sometimes with a sharp word, sometimes with a stare, sometimes with an exaggerated ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ when the ball beat the bat.
With Warne, the batsman was not just dismissed but usually defeated as well. A keen poker player, it was no surprise that his bowling followed a six-card trick, one for each ball of the over. The magic ball would get the batsmen, but the set up was just as important, as much theatre to watch.
Like all bowlers, the ball would occasionally not do his bidding, but this was neither because of lack of effort nor thoughtlessness. When Warne was bowling, every single delivery was an event and every action had a purpose.
Warne will be remembered most for what is referred to as the ball of the century when he made Mike Gatting look like a novice, but many other batsmen were left similarly red-faced. The look on Gatting’s face was as though he had seen a ghost, or perhaps witnessed the impossible.
This is because Warne often did not just pick up a wicket, he tormented the batsman and made a fool of him while he was at it.
What made Warne so loveable, aside from the obvious, was that he was a deeply flawed character as well. He was naive enough to provide information to illegal bookmakers in exchange for money. He was banned from the game for taking a prohibited substance, a diuretic that he said his mum gave him. And yes, there were women.
All of this helped humanise Warne to watchers of cricket. The average cricket fan cannot possibly relate to Warne’s craft, so impossibly good was he at one of cricket’s trickiest disciplines. But everyone knew what it was like to make a mistake, or an error of judgment and pay the price.
When Warne came on the scene, all tubby and raw, beer at the ready and fag not far away, it was not obvious at first just how good he was. On debut, he would take only one Test wicket, that of Ravi Shastri, and this came after the batsman had made 206.
By the end of Warne’s career, there was a different human being bowling leggies, literally and figuratively. Here was a svelte older gent, keen on his fitness and how he looked, a slimline version if you will, but there were no doubts whatsoever over his contribution to the game.
In a career spanning 145 Tests which yielded 708 wickets, and nearly 200 ODIs with World Cup wins thrown in for fun, Warne’s greatest impact was that he made spin bowling cool again.
In cricket, batsmen are the poster boys, and fast bowlers the most explosive, leaving spin with an unfair reputation of being geeky, even a soft discipline. But Warne proved that nothing was further from the truth.
Not many cricketers can claim to have drawn crowds to games and children to spin bowling, as Warne did. For a time, there were kids all around the world copying that trademark run up and round-arm delivery style.
Naturally not one of them grew up to be Warne. Because he was not a once in a generation player. He was one of a kind.
The king is dead. There’s nothing to add to that.
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