cricket with balls

In honour of the momentous one year anniversary of Are you a left arm chinaman?, I have decided to write a series of posts on Spin.

Episode 1. My Warne Years.

Imagine just for a moment, you are a leg spinner, that you are from Melbourne, and some guy called Warne just started his career.

Are you there yet?

Good.

Now just to add some spice, your favourite cricketer and personal tweaking idol is Mushtaq Ahmed. Or as a family friend once said, who, that fat little paki ©unt.

In 1991 no one cared about leg spin, when they heard I was one, they patted me on the head in a patronising way while they asked my dad about my batting.

In 1993, the world turned (pun intended), suddenly adults wanted to know if I bowled a flipper, whether I wanted to be like Warne, and how far I could spin the ball.

The answer was no, no and not far. I was 13, I was happy enough to land the ball on the pitch and bowl the odd wrong un down the leg side.

By 15 I had learned to land a wrong un, and could spin the ball enough to be included in representative sides and the like.

Problem was, I was not alone, Shane Warne had exntered 2 years after I started bowling leg spin, and so to me he was not the reason I got into the game. That was not the case for every other chubby batsmen, failed wicketkeeper or slow medium pacer, who suddenly realised all they had to do was walk in and rip the ball and people would get excited.

My under 16 side had 3, my first representative side had 4. I played seconds at my club while I was a junior, the first eleven had 2.

They were multiplying like rabbits, or Mormons, or Utah hares.

By 95 every time I came in with my whippy arm action, someone told me it was unnecessary. Don’t jog in flailing your arms, walk in slowly, you know, like Warney.

It was madness, there seemed to be two important factors people looked for in leg spinners in 96. Guys who could spin the ball sideways on ice, and guys who could bowl ten overs straight without a full toss or long hop.

98 was the first year I was told I was bowling too many wrong uns. Shane doesn’t bowl wrong uns. Well good for Shane. Maybe I should marry a blonde bimbo as well?

By 99 my quicker ball, which I had bowled since I was 11, was, as my captain of the time put it, a sign I hadn’t mastered my craft like Warne had. It got wickets, including a district first grade player once, but Warne didn’t do it, Afridi did. So it wasn’t proper leg spinning.

00 was the year I was in my best form of my life. The year before I’d taken an a$$ full of wickets, I was in complete control of my bowling. I could land a wrong and a slider in my first over. However my new captain had other ideas, what I should do was bowl 6 overs of leg spin to start, nothing else, just standard leggies and then I could start with the variation.

From that moment on my bowling stalled, it had nothing to do with the Warne shadow, I just wasn’t that good.

A boys gottsa know his limitations.

Warne did a lot of good things for me as well. I don’t wanna sound like a whiney pr1ck, if it wasn’t for him, people would have thought of me as a batsmen who bowls the last over before a drinks breaks.

I was often brought on first change. Anytime a game was stagnant I was thrown the ball. If my batting didn’t get me into a side my bowling would. I was given obscenely long spells, often when I wasn’t bowling well. All of those things were directly because of Warne.

I used to spend boxing day tests on level 3 of the members stand right behind his arm, just sitting on my own. When I was 14 I had a VCA poster on my wall that said Victoria win the Ashes. It had Pistol, Merv & Warne on it. Next to it was a poster that had the Gatting ball and Richie’s famous commentary on it.

The man is a genius, I could watch him bowl for days on end. He has done more for Leg Spinning than Paris Hilton did for amateur porn.

But the man has hands 3 times the size of mine and about 12,000 percent more talent than I will ever have.

I could live to be a billion years old, have reconstructive surgery by aliens, take all the performance enhancing (not masking) drugs in the world, summon up the spirit of Tiger Bill O’Reilly and I could still never be Shane Warne.

One Shane Warne is more than enough.

As is one Abdul Qadir, one Anil Kumble, and one Mushtaq Ahmed.