Was Shane Warne the greatest cricketer to rise up from down under?

Shane Warne’s sudden and untimely death last month touched many, hundreds of thousands, even millions. This wasn’t only because he was a great cricketer, selected by Wisden as one of the five greatest cricketers of the 20th century, but also because there was something of the happy rogue about him. 

Not for Shane Warne were the hours in the gym or the puritanical diet prescribed by nutritionists and inflicted on athletes of all sports today. He was a hamburger, chips, ice cream and beer man, tubby and self-indulgent. 

His private life was a bit of a mess, and, though he was obviously bright and proved in recent years to be an astute, if a too loquacious, TV commentator, it was easy to believe that he had never read a book. Still, he read the game, read and bamboozled batsmen, and always seemed to be having a good time.

He was credited with reviving the dying art or craft of wrist spin. But this wasn’t altogether the case. It might have died or been moribund in England, the West Indies and South Africa, and pretty sick even in Australia, but there were still wrist spinners in India and Pakistan. 

Indeed, Pakistan’s Abdul Qadir, only a few years older than Shane Warne, who also died too early, was a batsman as hard to read as Warne was. 

He had a better googly, but if asked about his googly (or “Bosie”, as the Australians call it) Shane might have answered as S F Barnes did, “I never needed it.”

Warne took more Test wickets than any other wrist spinner, and many think this entitled him to be called The Greatest of All Time”. Well, he is undoubtedly a candidate for this accolade.

One should remember that if he has taken many more wickets, he has also played many more Tests than his predecessors. Likewise, one might remark that James Anderson has taken more than twice what was at the time (1965) Fred Trueman’s world record of 307 Test victims, but Anderson has played much more than twice the number of Trueman’s 67 Tests.

Shane Warne had four great Australian wrist-spinning predecessors. There were other good ones, but only Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett, Bill O’Reilly and Richie Benaud challenged his pre-eminence.

Mailey, a cheerful soul who made his living as a newspaper cartoonist, played like a careless millionaire. He tossed the ball up, spun it sharply, had a well-disguised googly and top-spinner and was happy to concede runs if it could tempt the batsman to commit an indiscretion.

A generous and sensitive man who had grown up in poverty, he was also a Romantic. When, as a young man, he dismissed the great Victor Trumper, he felt ashamed. “It was as if I had shot a dove.”

If Mailey bowled like a man on a spree, his successor, Clarrie Grimmett, was more like a miser. A New Zealander by birth, he had failed there and failed at first in Australia before moving to Adelaide.

A small gnome-like man, prematurely bald, he was thirty-two when he played his first Test and had accustomed himself to bowl like a miser. His arm was low, and hours of practice in his back garden, where his fox terrier was trained to retrieve balls for him, had made him the most accurate of wrist spinners.

This proved especially effective in England, where the softer wickets suited him better than the then brick-hard Australian ones. He played Test cricket into his middle forties and finished with what was then the world record of 216 wickets in only 37 Tests.

In the 1930s, he found a spin partner in Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly, though wrist spin was almost all they had in common. Grimmett was small. O’Reilly stood 6ft 3″. Grimmett took wickets by stealth; O’Reilly, bowling his leg-breaks, top-spinners and googlies at a medium pace, imposed himself on the batsman.

He proved the master of England’s champion, Wally Hammond, and Don Bradman thought O’Reilly was the best bowler he ever faced. This was generous of him since they were very different, the Don of English Protestant stock, the Tiger an Irish Catholic.

There was a crop of very good Aussie wrist-spinners when cricket resumed in 1946, but with a new ball available after 50 overs and fast bowlers such as Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller and Bill Johnston, they were hardly needed.

It was sometime before Richie Benaud established himself as the heir to Grimmett and O’Reilly. Despite being hampered by a shoulder injury, he would take what was then an Australian record of 248 Test wickets while also being a fine attacking batsman, a magnificent close fielder and arguably the most astute of all Australian captains.

So who was the best of these Australian bamboozlers? I guess it is probably Warne for his total wickets and his influence on the game. Yet if he was rarely mastered, except by some Indian batsmen —Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman — O’Reilly never was, except on the deadest of wickets at The Oval in 1938 when the young Len Hutton made the Test match record score of 364 surpassing the Don’s 334.

Of course, speculation of this sort can rarely be more than matter for an idle moment. What is certain is that these very different exponents of the same demanding craft all, at times anyway, established a moral ascendancy over their Test match opponents — especially, perhaps, the English ones.