No Spin - Shane Warne Is Indeed Gone

Can't be.

I couldn’t have written this last night. Or today morning. For that matter, I don’t know what I am doing on this notepad right now. How does one write an obituary for someone they bought posters of, imitated, wanted to be like? This evening, about twenty-four hours after Cricket Australia confirmed the news, I was lurking around Twitter to find a ray of hope about a sick joke. I somehow wanted someone, anyone, to tell me Warne could be alive. He had to be.

I must have watched a movie’s length of his clips on YouTube since last night. There is gold dust sprinkled on every delivery he bowls, every dismissal he plots. Over the last many years, I have watched these clips multiple times, shared them with friends, and guffawed over them. How good do you have to be to do that? In 2011, Shane Warne was mic-ed up, talking to the commentary team as he began his run-up in a Big Bash League match. He told the commentators how he is going to get Brendon McCullum out. And then he did just that.

Growing up in mid-90s India, cricket was my first sport. Well, at least the one I watched and played most frequently because everyone around me was. Football or tennis seemed almost like a niche interest. In backyard cricket games, you wanted to be in the middle of the action for as long as possible. I say this because the batting part of this story is simple - you wanted to be Tendulkar. Between 1996 and 2001, if you held a bat in India, you wanted to do what Sachin could. And every hero needs an adversary, an enemy he vanquishes. For Tendulkar, that was Warne. 

I first saw Shane Warne on the television, all blonde hair and face paint and open shirt buttons. Australiana, if you will. As a kid getting taught some strict rules of social etiquette, I couldn’t believe someone dressed like that. The Indian players were wearing neatly tucked-in shirts with all buttons in place. What is this exotic surfer doing on a cricket field? 

And then I watched him amble to the crease and bowl. That was it. If you watched Shane Warne once, you were now part of his theatre. You had no choice but to get sucked in. To a kid, there is nothing more alluring than mischief, and there isn’t a more mischievous skill in cricket than leg-spin. Warne’s craft needed complete mastery of land, air, and the mind. And he did that all. He toyed with batters, making them push and prod and slide and jump, only to realise that the ball is not going to pitch where they thought it would.

Here’s the thing — if someone tosses up a fruit in the air towards you, you will stretch for it inadvertently. If you miss, it would look silly, but you’ll have a smile on your face. Watching Warne from close was a lot like that. You predicted one thing but something completely different would happen. You were just left giggling. It was like he was setting up the audience as much as the batter. I can only imagine what playing him must have been like.

Warne was a poster on my cupboard, a model to imitate in backyard cricket, and a figure of industrial-scale jealousy. I could understand Tendulkar, Lara, and Donald. Conventional, puritan skills, honed to the point of complete control. I never understood how Warne did what he did, five days at a stretch, many times in a year. My generation never got to witness Diego Maradona’s mad genius, but we had Warne. We had the full bloody range of Shane Warne.

We loved him because we could not, even with every possible ounce of talent in the world, be like him. Indians played and behaved a certain way. We were shown the silent work ethic of Tendulkar and Kumble. That was our culture. Be a nice kid at school and don’t fight with anyone. We were taught that if you want to be good at anything, you must shut out everything else. Warne rocked in wearing huge sunglasses, spun around batters like they were stuck in a revolving door, and went off to hang out with Michael Jordan. I wish I had adequate words to explain how important Shane Warne was to a generation growing up in technicolour, new-television India. He literally showed us a different world, at a time when cricket, and India, hadn’t yet broken free from its imperial past. 

And I wish I could explain how Warne was equally important for cricket. Maybe I will leave the dissection for a clearer headspace. A sample, though — he made his debut at a time when ODIs were played in white clothing and red balls; he retired playing T20 cricket in Australia and India. He was the first winning captain of cricket’s most transformative tournament in the last two decades. He championed the use of analytics in commentary. Shane Warne, born in 1969, had a TikTok account where he combined cricket moves with dance steps.

There will be many garlands of tribute woven for him this week, mostly by writers far better than I will ever be. But I was part of the brotherhood that watched Warne with eyes peeled to the screen. I took that slow run up a few thousand times as a kid, spun oranges and apples between my palms as if I’m about to send a flipper through Daryll Cullinan’s defence. On the odd instance the ball beat the bat, I have yelled “Bowled, Warnie!”. Everyone around me did. We had to choose different batters every evening, but we could all be Warne with the ball.

Kids take to a sport because it is joyous, thrilling, entertaining. Shane Warne was all of that, and had the persona of a rockstar to boot. Try not loving that.

It feels wrong to write Shane Warne is dead. Can’t be, not him.