Shane Warne: My Autobiography

By RICHARD BOOCK

For someone who claims never to have read a book from start to finish, Australian cricketer Shane Warne makes a decent fist of writing one, even if Times writer and co-author Richard Hobson plays a leading hand.

Long-awaited, the book Shane Warne - my autobiography records Warne's official view on the triumphs, disasters and dramas which have littered his career, and reveals the peroxide-blonde Victorian as a master of spin in more ways than one.

Preceded by a number of unauthorised, unworthy and often repetitive exposes, the genuine article allows a reasonable insight into the world's star leg-spinner, the man who, fitness permitting, could end up smashing test cricket's wicket-taking record.

At the moment, the 32-year-old lies in fifth place on the all-time charts with 407 wickets, 112 shy of Courtney Walsh's 519, and possibly only two years away from making the record his own.

To put him in context, Warne was recently voted one of the five greatest cricketers of the 20th century - along with Sir Donald Bradman, Sir Jack Hobbs, Sir Garfield Sobers and Sir Vivian Richards, although it seems distinctly unlikely he will follow the trend and become a knight of the realm.

Warney's style is more a night on the town.

The book gives him a good opportunity to clear up some of the misunderstandings created during his colourful career, including the suggestion that he was expelled from the Australian Institute of Sport's Cricket Academy for skylarking, when he really left of his own volition.

He argues that he was unfairly relieved of the Australian vice-captaincy after leaving explicit messages on a British nurse's answerphone last year; he still insists the "can't bat, can't throw" comments broadcast on television about team-mate Scott Muller came from a Channel Nine staffer, and he continues to condemn the Wellington schoolboy who photographed him smoking a cigarette - rather than focusing on his own dubious attitude.

In a long-winded, highly defensive slant on the Wellington incident, Warne attempts to suggest that he had a right to take the boy's bag and camera, as "people could get into trouble if they sold the picture to a newspaper".

The idea that robbery can get you into a lot more trouble doesn't seem to have occurred to him.

As for the dirty-talking saga with the nurse, father-of-two Warne argues that everyone has a right to a private life (apart from the nurse, apparently) and that he should not have been stripped of the vice-captaincy.

"I wonder what might happen if the backgrounds of the 14 [Australian Cricket Board] directors themselves were investigated," he says. "If the same rules apply, as they should, then they, too, must have led unblemished lives - or they are not fit to do their jobs."

Then there was the uproar over the money-for-information controversy, when Warne and team-mate Mark Waugh admitted to receiving money from a bookmaker in 1994.

Soon after, during New Zealand's Centenary Cup competition, Australian manager Ian McDonald called Warne into his room and asked if he knew anything about players taking money in return for pitch and weather information.

"My response was 'No'," Warne writes. "Because when [the man called] John gave me $5000 he wanted nothing in return.

"Technically, I had accepted money from a man who was a bookmaker. And yes, I did speak to him about pitches and weather. I remain adamant I did nothing wrong."

Warne and Waugh were secretly fined $8000 and $10,000 respectively by the ACB, who unwisely attempted to sweep the matter under the carpet and paid the price three years later, when the news finally broke in December 1998.

Born in Ferntree Gully on September 13, 1969, Warne was obsessed with Aussie Rules and only started thinking seriously about cricket at the age of 19, when he was deemed surplus to requirements at his beloved St Kilda club.

Within three years he made his first-class debut for Victoria, toured the West Indies with the Australian youth team, and made his test debut against India.

If Warne could single out one moment which influenced his career more than any other, it would undoubtedly be his opening delivery to English batsman Mike Gatting at Manchester in the first test of the 1993 Ashes, when a perfectly flighted leggie pitched just outside leg-stump and spun back viciously, dislodging Gatting's off-bail.

It has since been dubbed The Ball of the Century, but Warne describes it modestly as a complete fluke. That delivery has given rise to a collection of one-liners at the expense of the amply proportioned Gatting.

"Ian Botham said afterwards that he hadn't seen the same look of wide-eyed horror on Gatting's face since somebody stole his lunch a few years back," says Warne.

Another to have revelled in the humour of the dismissal is former England captain Graham Gooch, who has a variety of Gatting jokes in his after-dinner speech repertoire, the best of which is probably if that ball from Warne at Old Trafford had been a cheese-roll, it would never have got past him.

Cricket writer Martin Johnson had this to say about the delivery: "Shane Warne's bowling, in particular, was something to marvel at, and his first delivery in Ashes cricket will be as treasured a piece of archive film as anything involving Bodyline or Bradman.

"How anyone can a spin a ball the width of Gatting boggles the mind."

* Richard Boock is the Herald's cricket writer.

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