Legendary Australian Spinner Shane Warne

March 6, 2022

Shane Warne was a cricketer from Australia. He was a right-arm leg spinner who is widely regarded as one of the finest bowlers in cricket history, and he was named as one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Century by a panel of cricket experts in 2000, the only specialist bowler in the quintet and the only one still playing at that time.

Overview:

He passed away on 4^th March 2022 from a suspected heart attack.
In a 15-year career for Australia he took 708 test wickets, and in 1999, won the Cricket World Cup.
In 2009, he was awarded Marylebone Cricket Club’s Honorary Life Membership.

Early Life

On 13 September 1969, he was born in Ferntree Gully, Victoria, Australia to Bridgette and Keith Warne. He attended Hampton High School from Grades 7-9 before being given a sports scholarship to Mentone Grammar School. He made his first appearance for the University of Melbourne Cricket Club in the Victorian Cricket Association’s under-16 Dowling Shield competition in 1983-84. During that time, he bowled a combination of off-spin and leg-spin and was a lower-order batsman.

In 1990, he was chosen to train at the Australian Cricket Academy located in Adelaide. For the 1991 season, he joined the Accrington Cricket Club of the Lancashire League as a professional player. In 1991 he made his first-class cricket debut for Victoria against Western Australia. Following this, he was chosen for the Australian B Team and toured Zimbabwe.

Test Debut

Warne’s international career began in Australia, where he made his debut against India in the third Test in a five-match series between the two nations. Warne, a 22-year-old at the time, would only take one wicket in the match, that of Ravi Shastri, who made a double century.

Cricket Career

Warne took 34 wickets at an average of 25.79 in six tests in the 1993 Ashes series against England. During the 1993 series, he was best remembered for one ball or that ball or Gatting Ball which is termed as the ball of the century, which he bowled to Mike Gatting of England at Old Trafford, Manchester.

In 1998, he was involved in controversy after it was revealed that he and another Australian cricketer Mark Waugh had taken bribes from an Indian bookie four years prior. They stated that they only provided pitch information and weather forecasts. However, the Australian Cricket Board penalized the two in secret. In February 2003, he was excluded from the World Cup in South Africa due to the use of a banned diuretic, which was discovered during a drug test. He was then given a 12-month suspension.

He took his 500th wicket in his first Test match after his return in March 2004, making him only the second bowler in history to do so. By the end of the season (2003-2004), Warne and Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan had surpassed Courtney Walsh’s (West Indies) record of 519 Test wickets set in 2001. He took 300 test wickets in 63 matches. In 2005, he became the first bowler in the test format to reach 600 wickets. In 2007, Warne retired from Test cricket, but he continued to play club cricket till 2011.

In his career, he took 708 wickets, and later this record was broken by Muralitharan.

T20 Career and Retirement

In 2008, he was appointed as the captain of Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League, after retiring from international cricket. He led the Royals to victory in the inaugural season of the competition and continued to captain them for four more seasons, with 2011 being his final season with the team. He was signed as a player for the Melbourne Stars in Australia’s inaugural Big Bash League in November 2011. (BBL). In eight games, he took seven wickets at an economy rate of 6.72 runs per over. He announced his retirement from all formats in July 2013.

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