The madness of King Shane

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Not my work - that of Simon Barnes of the Times. Best piece of sports writing I've read in years.

August 27, 2005

Australia driven by the madness of King Shane
By Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer at Trent Bridge

BUT let me draw your attention to the madness of King
Shane. To the trained observer, it is becoming
increasingly clear that Shane Warne is going off his
chump. I shall run through the symptoms in a moment,
but the reason for his developing madness is his
singleminded attempt to retain the Ashes for Australia
all by himself. I still wouldn’t put it beyond him to
do it.

Watch him fielding at first slip, a man possessed by
an insane spirit of restlessness. He is desperate for
the ball, willing it to come to him even during the
long and gorgeous stand between Andrew Flintoff and
Geraint Jones, believing that every next ball would
turn the match, save the day, put Australia once more
in the ascendant.

Watch him appealing. Warne has never been diffident
when asking the overwhelming question, but as the
series has developed he has taken appealing to a new
pitch of intensity. He was always a ten for volume
(perhaps even a Spinal Tap 11) but he has added an
element of length.

He holds the note of interrogation for about 16 bars,
like the fat one in The Three Tenors, agonising,
beseeching, demanding. He has lost all shame, all
embarrassment, nothing matters to him any more except
wickets. A man with fewer than 600 Test wickets may
have known official reproof, for Warne is taking the
players’ code to the limit and beyond.

It’s vibe that saves him. He is not cheating, he is
not trying to get something for nothing, he is not
trying to intimidate. He is just mad.

Mad with desperation for a victory that he can
increasingly feel slipping from his sandpaper fingers.
He is not really addressing the umpire, he is howling
to Job’s God to cease the torment and return the world
to his accustomed order, ie, Australia beating England
by a considerable margin.

Above all, watch him batting. Warne has always liked
to tease opposition bowlers by his capable and
idiosyncratic batsmanship, but now he is compiling
large and seriously significant innings. The reason is
because the batsmen are not doing their job and
someone’s got to do it.

So he has brought his talent and his cricketing
intelligence and his will to bear on the subject of
batsmanship. All these things are great with Warne,
but the greatest of these is the third. And so he just
missed a maiden Test century in the first innings at
Old Trafford and made a powerful contribution to
Australia’s saving of the match in the second.

He bowls in a frenzy of appetite, not the bowler he
was in his prime, but even cannier. His ability to
will a batsman out is now the most important part of
his armoury. He is trying to do every job on the field
himself, carrying his team by means of his own skill,
his own will. He is attempting, over a full summer, to
do what David Beckham did against Greece, and what
Steven Gerrard did in Istanbul in May.

In England’s first innings here, Warne willed out four
batsmen. He was Australia’s leading wicket-taker.
Again. That’s 24 in total this series: no one else on
either side is close.

The only thing he is not doing is captaining the side.
If he had been captain, Australia would now be two-up.
Why isn’t he captain, then? He is one of the smartest
cricketers that ever drew breath, a team man through
and through, a generous man among colleagues, and a
rallying point for his side. He also has the hardness
of the great Australia captain, Steve Waugh, the
willingness to take risks, to seize a weakness, to
dominate and to overwhelm.

But the respectable Ricky Ponting is captain, and
Ponting is presiding over the decline of the great
Australian cricket team. Australia has a reputation,
in this country at least, for an unflinching
hard-headedness about sport and a marked taste for the
larrikin ethic. That is to miss another and less
thrilling aspect of Australian life, the kind that
Dame Edna satirises, with its suburban smugness, its
gladioli and lawnmowers, and its unthinking
stuffiness.

If Warne had been English — admittedly a scarcely
tenable proposition — he would certainly have been
made captain.

But Australia mistrust the raffish side of Warne: the
naughty text messages, the rebellious youth, the ban
for the silliest drug-taking event in sporting history
— a borrowed slimming tablet taken in the vain hope
that it would stop him looking like an old fat-face.

Warne can do daft things, but he is not a daft
cricketer. If Australia manage to save this series, it
will be because of Warne. If they lose it, it will be
because Warne is not captain. Warne knows these two
things and the knowledge is driving him mad.

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