Cricket: Wiliest old dogs learn new tricks to stay on top

The truly remarkable thing about Shane Warne is not the fact he captured nearly 100 wickets in a calendar year. Remarkable, but not as astonishing as the fact that, aged 36 with 14 years of test cricket behind him, he is bowling better than ever.

Finger and shoulder injuries mean he might not have the same skidding flipper he once had or the ripping side-spinner that could turn on glass. But he is a better bowler nonetheless.

His method is no longer a steady supply of unplayable balls, the likes of which Mike Gatting is still having nightmares about. Now it extends to his canny treatment of umpires and his razor-sharp cricketing brain that can smell a weakness in a batsman from the moment he crosses the boundary rope.

Warne's most successful ball these days is the one that drifts in to the right-hander like a conventional legspinner but, instead of hitting the deck and turning away, keeps on snaking in. Top order batsmen have trouble enough with it and tail-enders find it near impossible to keep it from hitting their pads plumb in front.

The point is that Warne has never stopped learning and trying new things. He might appear at times to be arrogant but the ultimate arrogance is when you think you have nothing left to learn.

The true greats keep modifying their craft.

Steve Waugh was an obvious example. As a free-flowing strokeplayer who played 360-degrees around the wicket he was a lot of fun to watch but not that difficult for good bowlers to dismiss.

He got sick of the idea of fleeting brilliance, got heartily sick at the thought of being dropped again, and cut down his areas of scoring, the type of shots he played and became an altogether more prolific batsman.

Sachin Tendulkar is another who has changed his game to suit. In his teens and most of his 20s, he was the ultimate dasher. But as his extraordinary reflexes dulled ever so slightly and injuries began imposing, he reined himself in and became more compact, less extravagant, but with little effect on his output.

Sir Richard Hadlee and Glenn Turner are perhaps the best example of New Zealanders who radically changed the way they played the game for the betterment of themselves and, ultimately, the team. Hadlee chopped down his run-up in search of rhythm and longevity, while the birth of one-day cricket meant Turner had to learn to hit the ball off the square.

In this current New Zealand set-up, however, it is hard to think of a player that has adapted his game for the better. Sure, Lou Vincent alternates between a slogger and a strokeplayer but that is batting on a whim, not a plan. Stephen Fleming probably comes closest, having turned from a loose-wristed dasher to a more refined accumulator.

Dan Vettori, too, has modified his batting along the same lines as Fleming and perhaps it is no surprise they're consistently New Zealand's most successful players.

Which brings me round to Nathan Astle. The Black Caps' selectors were absolutely right to drop New Zealand's most successful one-day batsman, even if he did get a free pass back into the squad with Fleming's ante-natal dash.

Astle's dogged belief in the methods that have made him successful has been his greatest strength and his most glaring weakness. It's why he has been New Zealand's most successful international century-maker (26 in both forms of the game compared to Martin Crowe's 21) yet has never pushed his average above 40 in either form of the game.

Astle always believes he is always just one innings from turning things around. He'll still get the odd score here and there because he is a supremely talented individual but, if he wants to end his career as a consistently useful batsman, he needs to find new areas to score in.

The Cantabrian lives on width, no matter the length, so he can free his arms through the offside. Everybody knows it, especially experienced bowlers and captains.

His closed-off stance makes it difficult to score through the leg side, so the instructions are simple: no width, err on the side of middle-and-leg rather than middle-and-off.

Astle's still good enough to get better and be a fixture for New Zealand for the next few years, or at least through to the World cup in 2007.

He might just need to look over the Tasman to see that old dogs are still learning new tricks.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY