Posts tagged Cricket

In a career spanning almost 20 years, Warne has divided opinions globally and more so in his native country where some believe he was the messiah of cricket, making leg spin sexy again, while others thought him to be a constant source of embarrassment to the country due to his bad boy behaviour. He was accused of two of the biggest crimes in the game, when he admitted to taking money from a bookmaker for providing pitch information, and later when he was suspended for a year after testing positive for a diuretic in his system. Warne has also been in the papers for pursuing a number of women, writing about whom will take up pages, and hence I will leave it at this. Warne has always been in the headlines, be it for the wrong reasons or the right. He announced himself on the field in 1993 when an innocuous looking leg break pitched outside the leg stump of Mike Gatting to clip the off stump leaving everyone on the ground shocked and the batsman bamboozled. Since that delivery, there have been many others, eventually leading to Warne becoming the first bowler in history to cross the 700 mark in Test cricket. Warne was a presence on the field and in the mind. Each delivery had its own preamble; walking slowly to his mark, curling the ball from hand to hand as he made the batsman wait. And then the slow action to deliver the ball, so simple, so artless – yet no one could tell whether it would be a flipper or a leg break or something else altogether. The last few years in Test cricket were perhaps his best, as he came back from his suspension as if there was no break, and scaled previously unreached heights. Rated as one of the five greatest cricketers of the 20