Calder at large - Wizard of Oz casts a spell

By Peter Calder

It's the eyes you notice first. Limpid green, sparingly flecked with brown, they sparkle, even across a hotel foyer.

The frosted hair, the bold gold chain are adult trademarks of the man whose extravagant ebullience earned him the nickname Hollywood. But the eyes he was born with. And they sparkle like a diamond in a gangster's tooth. It's a sparkle of unassailable self-confidence, one which has doubtless broken a few hearts with its irresistible charm. But the sparkle in Shane Warne's eyes must look anything but charming as, 25m away, he begins his run to the bowling crease.

If you can call that a run. Starting level with the umpire, he takes two lazy paces, more sauntering than stepping. The elbows jut, the hands seem to clasp in prayer, hiding from the batsman the exact shape of the fingers on the slightly aspherical seamed leather ball.

The next two paces might approach a trot, not to gather pace so much as to gain elevation for what's about to happen. Pirouetting on his left toe, he unwinds from side-on to face-forward like a spring-loaded corkscrew. The face contorts into a grimace - unsparkling now, those eyes seem pitilessly blank - and the tongue snakes out between the lips.

And he explodes. Finger, wrist, shoulder and body unwind in sudden, perfect tandem, imparting a hissing spin to the ball. It hits the turf in front of the bowler, bites and turns from left to right.

Or not. And that's the problem. Moving from left to right, it's a leg break and Shane Warne's a leg spinner. But he has a few other tricks up his flannelled sleeve as well. The wrong'un or googly looks like a leg break but goes the other way. The flipper lands and scoots low, sneaking under the batsman's guard. The top-spin doesn't turn, but bounces, stops, loops, upsetting the batsman's timing. Often as not, the batsman doesn't know what's happening until it's happened.

And, from hand to bounce, it all happens in less than three-quarters of a second. It may look slow on television, but Warne bowls at over 80 km/h - more than half the speed of Pete Sampras' biggest serve.

The pundits are picking that the pitch will "turn" during the first cricket test between Australia and New Zealand which starts at Eden Park today. Setting aside the technicalities of the turf, it means that over the next five days we - and the New Zealand batsmen - should see plenty of the spin bowlers, including the man they call the Wizard of Oz.

Warne's eyes are on a special prize this weekend. If he takes five of the 20 New Zealand wickets available to him in the match, he'll pass the record 355 dismissals of the great fast bowler Dennis Lillee and become the most successful Australian test bowler of all time.

Contemplating the challenge in his team hotel on Thursday, Warne had mixed feelings about surpassing the feat of a man he grew up idolising.

"I spoke to Dennis just before I left Australia," he said, "and had a good old chat with the great man. Look, he said some very flattering things about me and I hope I'll be able to share a beer with him and chat about good times."

Victory is important to the Australian team, who haven't won a test at Eden Park for more than 20 years and who are poised to equal the Australian record for consecutive test wins. But Warne's milestone is a big one too, as the bowler admits.

"I don't play the game for records, but when you get so close to a record, you really want to break it."

Warne, who turned 30 in the spring, exploded on to the world cricket stage at the end of 1992, when he mesmerised the West Indians in the traditional Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground - in one spell taking seven wickets in 14 overs for 21 runs.

Since then he has bamboozled every cricket-playing nation in turn and become a household name.

In a country where bowlers are traditionally rangy, sweating pacemen, he revived the art of wrist-spinning, which had long been the preserve of bowlers from what the cricket world calls "the sub-continent" - India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Richie Benaud, the voice of cricket broadcasting and a legendary Australian captain, described him as "the best leg-spinner I have ever seen" - high praise from a man who was himself one of the game's great leggies.

The ball hasn't always spun Warne's way, though. A few batsmen got the measure of him a few times and his figures slumped. In 1996, he overworked and injured the ring finger on his right hand, the one with which he imparts the spin to the ball. The next year it was his shoulder that gave out, the ball-and-socket joint and the capsule of tendons supporting it appallingly mauled by the contortions of his craft.

Two years in the wilderness of recovery were followed by indifferent form, culminating in the humiliation of being dropped from the test team.

But now he's back and hungry.

"I think I'm bowling as good as I ever have," he said on Thursday, just before heading out to the team practice.

"The ball's been coming out pretty well, except for the flipper; I've been landing it a bit short. But everything else - wrong'un, toppie, straight one, zooter, leg break - they've been good.

"The big-turning leg breaks aren't as big as they used to be. But you can't bowl a ripper leg break all the time. Generally I try and set them up for the big-turning leg break.

"Batsmen know what you bowl. What they don't know is how far it's going to turn or bounce or drift, so if you can keep them guessing about that ..." His voice tails off meaningfully.

Warne's off-field career has had its ups and downs as well. He and all-rounder Mark Waugh narrowly escaped expulsion from the game in 1998 when it emerged they had accepted payment for supplying (admittedly rather mundane) pitch and weather information to an Indian bookmaker.

A heavy smoker, he accepted $A200,000 ($250,000) from an Australian pharmaceuticals company to quit - only to be photographed lighting up in a Barbados bar. Then last month he monstered a couple of young Wellington lads, one of whom had snapped him sucking on a fag. He confiscated one boy's bag, holding it hostage for return of the camera until the police intervened. He later apologised, "if there has been any misunderstanding."

Such blunders will do nothing for his ambition to captain the side. He's the vice-captain now, but the Australian captaincy traditionally eludes the more colourful players.

Still, it's a job he "obviously" would like to do.

"If it was offered to me down the track I'd jump at the chance and I hope the players would like me. It would be a honour. But at the moment Steve Waugh's doing a great job and I'm happy being his vice-captain."

This week, though, he was keen to put the past behind and focus on his cricket.

"Looking back on those eight or nine years, there's been some tough times and there's been some great times and there'd be a few things I'd rather change, with hindsight. But I can't, so you learn by your mistakes. You've just got to get on and live your life."

Marriage and children (Warne's wife, Simone, and his 21/2-year-old daughter, Brooke, joined him on tour on Thursday; his nine-month-old son Jackson stayed home) have altered his perspective on life and cricket, he says, and he's not the wild boy he was - "going out on the town and having late nights and all that."

"If my shoulder stays strong and I'm enjoying it, I don't see why I couldn't play for another four years."

Four years would give him more than enough time to past Kapil Dev's record as test cricket's most prolific wicket-taker (434, three ahead of our own Sir Richard Hadlee). Warne whistles at the prospect and says it's "a long way off at this stage."

But the numbers stack up. That bleached blond who takes the ball in hand at Eden Park sometime this weekend is as likely as anyone to become, if only for a while, the best bowler of all time.