Paul Lewis: Spinners a visual treat

One of the great joys of the current Australian test series with Pakistan has been watching two leg spinners, Shane Warne and Danish Kaneria, go about their business. Famous Australian opener and now cricket commentator Bill Lawry claimed several years back there was no place in modern cricket for leg spinners. Six months later, along came Shane Warne. I wonder if Bill still feels the same way.

In cricket, there is no better sight than a good leggie trying out his stable of deliveries. It's a game of chess, a contest for control, an intricacy of flight and subtle adjustments of wrist and fingers. The art of good leg spin is disguise - so that each ball delivered looks the same but performs differently upon hitting the pitch.

The wonder is that anyone bowling leg spin can hit the pitch at all. The bowler must hold the ball in a way for which the hand was not designed. Then he must release the ball at precisely the right moment and with precisely the right amount of work on it and with precisely the right amount of flight. It is almost not sport, but science.

And this is why it is so satisfying that Warne is the most prolific wicket-taker in the history of cricket. Warne is a cricketing genius - and more so since his career took that dip. For there is no doubt that he is less a bowler than he used to be after injuries and surgery to shoulder and fingers, and he went through a bit of a slump to prove it. He's 35 now and must be nearing the end as a test cricketer.

The injuries and maybe just the ravages of time mean that his celebrated "flipper" - the faster skidding ball that trapped so many at his peak - has gone, as has his wrong 'un. This is the ball that turns in the opposite direction to the stock delivery but which looks pretty much the same to the batsman when it is bowled. He still has a wrong 'un but it is a pale imitation of the fizzing, nasty thing that used to terrify batsmen.

But if you watched him against Pakistan in the first two tests, he has overcome these obstacles with enhanced control and by adding new deliveries to his repertoire - a "slider", a straight ball that goes into the pads but which looks like a leg spinner. He has also developed a "zooter" - a front-of-the-hand ball that uses backspin and also traps the batsman in front of his wickets or promotes the miscue. His control of the stock leg spinner has become so wonderfully good that he rarely bowls a bad ball. And his hunger for cricket has not diminished. Watch him against Pakistan and you will see an immense appetite for wickets. 561 wickets and he wants more, always more. His face when bowling has a lean and hungry look, he wants a wicket every ball, he is a shark circling a seal. And this in a sport which can promote boredom among its foremost practitioners. The sheer, numbing, metronomic quality of it all can dull minds and desires and turn what starts out as a sport and then becomes a privileged living into just another a day at the office. Ask a room full of professional golfers and cricketers how many still play for fun and see how many positive responses you get.

Warne still turns the ball prodigiously - one delivery against a startled Pakistani batsman in the second test turned out of a rough patch on the pitch that it seemed to spin well over a metre. It brought back memories of his dismissal of former England captain Mike Gatting in a delivery which must rate as one of the best ever bowled in test cricket, a vicious spinning grenade of a ball which pitched so far outside the stumps that Gatting thought it could not possibly hit them. It did.

Warne wants to play for two more years and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that he will, and he may even be the first to hit 600 wickets in test matches. Unbelievable, really.

Then there is Kaneria - only 24 and only 94 test wickets into his career and he is just starting to make a dent in the batting of some of the major test match nations. His five wickets against Australia in the second test were worth watching, even though he got some stick in the second innings.

Like Warne, he really turns the ball and he is still developing his variations and mystery balls. Like Warne, he has an aggressive and hungry streak.

The other leg spin bowler of note in the world is India's Anil Kumble but he does not turn the ball as prodigiously as these two and relies more on flight and subtle variations. Kumble has just surpassed Kapil Dev as India's leading wicket-taker of all time and this year broke Saqlain Mushtaq's record for most wickets in a season. . Kaneria says he wants to supplant Warne as the greatest wicket-taker in history. But he's got a long way to go. It's not just a matter of 470-odd wickets but also growing his cleverness and control.