Tony BeccaIf you should ask me who is the greatest bowler the world has ever seen, or better still, who is the greatest bowler that I have ever seen, I would, unhesitatingly, reply, Shane Warne - the Australian who played his last Test match in Sydney on Friday.
A spin bowler who played in 145 Test matches, Warne took 708 wickets, he boasted a strike rate of 57.49 and an economy rate of 2.65, he took five wickets in an innings, including a best of eight for 71, on 37 occasions, 10 in a match 10 times, and in any language, in any age, those are magnificent figures.
As impressive as those figures are, however, they are probably not as good as those of fast bowler Glenn McGrath and not as good as those of spinner Muttiah Muralitharan.
Statistics
In 124 matches, McGrath, Warne's fellow retiree, took 563 wickets, boasted a strike rate of 51.95 and an economy rate of 2.49, took five wickets in an innings, including a best of eight for 24, on 29 occasions, and 10 in a match three times.
In 110 matches, Muralitharan has taken 674 wickets, boasts a strike rate of 54.45 and an economy rate of 2.39, he has taken five wickets in an innings, including a best of nine for 51, on 57 occasions and 10 in a match 19 times.
And when it comes to bowling averages, Warne's 25.35 pales in comparison to McGrath's 21.73, to Muralitharan's 21.73, to Curtley Ambrose's 20.99, and to Malcolm Marshall's 20.95.
With the figures showing that Warne could be, at best, number two or number three in the ranking, why then do I rate him the best bowler that I have ever seen?
It is simply because that as one who believes that bowling, like batting, is an art, I am not a slave to statistics.
Drives fears
I rate Warne as the greatest bowler that I have ever seen on the basis that his figures are good enough to stand comparison with the best of them, because of what he does with a ball in his hand, and because of the fear he drives into batsmen, most of them, at the opposite end.
I have never ever seen anyone do so much with a cricket ball as Warne did with one, and I have never ever seen a bowler reduced so many batsmen to such incompetence as Warne did to so many of many of the world's best batsmen.
The only exceptions, to what seemed the norm, were Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar.
While the greatness of bowlers like McGrath and Ambrose is their unerring accuracy, the greatness of a bowler like Marshall is his ability to swing the ball along with his well-disguised change of pace.
Apart from the fact that many believe, and with good reason, that he throws the ball and therefore contravenes the original laws of the game, the greatness of Muralitharan is his degree of spin and variation in flight, the greatness of Warne was that he made a cricket ball do almost everything it was possible for it to do.
The only thing he did not make a cricket ball do is talk.
Amazing bowling
A right-arm leg-spinner at heart, Warne bowled a googly - although not very often - he bowled a flipper, he bowled a top-spinner, he bowled a slider, and in between some of the biggest-turning leg-breaks ever seen in the history of the game, in between slanting the ball into the right-handed batsman through the air and then spinning it from leg to off when it hit the pitch, in between his amazing change of pace, his subtle variation of flight, in further confusion of the unfortunate batsman, he bowled some which did not turn at all, and which went straight through to hit the stumps or the pads.
Warne was a magician, he bamboozled batsmen to the point of fear, on good pitches he was deadly, on bad pitches, on a pitch four or five days old, he was unplayable, and sometimes, he was unplayable simply because of his reputation to destroy batsmen and to force them to their knees.
Routing players
At Adelaide, the second Test of the series just ended, England resumed their second innings at 59 for one on the last day boasting a lead of 97, and with Warne bowling 27 overs in succession and taking four wickets for 19 run, they were routed for 129 and lost the match by eight wickets.
At the MCG in 1992-93, he ripped out the West Indies with figures of seven for 52 off 23.3 overs, at Brisbane 1995-96, he destroyed Pakistan for 97 with seven for 23, and one day at Old Trafford, with his first delivery in an Ashes Test match, he bowled Mike Gatting for four with a delivery which pitched way outside the leg-stump and hit the top of the off-stump with Gatting, the England number three, looking as if he had seen a ghost.
Will not be the same
Yes, to me, Shane Warne, the man rated in 2000 by Wisden as one of the five greatest cricketers of the 20th century, is probably the greatest bowler of all time, with due respect to Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller, Fred Trueman, Marshall, Ambrose, Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and Michael Holding, Sonny Ramadhin, Subhash Gupte, Lance Gibbs and Abdul Qadir.
He is the greatest bowler that I have ever seen, and for me, watching cricket, watching the contest between a bowler and a batsman, will hardly ever be the same now that he has hung up his boots.
