It seems Stuart MacGill is forever destined to lurk in the shadows. No sooner does Shane Warne retire - yes, the man who has restricted him to one of cricket's most unsung 40-Test careers - than along comes Brad Hogg and his fancy chinamen to push for a place in tomorrow's first Test between Australia and Sri Lanka at Brisbane. Hogg's challenge has been seen off, but that simply means attention will now turn to Muttiah Muralitharan and his assault on Warne's Test wicket-taking record. "I can't wait to get into the swing of things because it feels like it's been stop-start," said MacGill the other day, politely refusing to add that it's been more stop than start.
Since making his Test debut against South Africa at Adelaide almost a decade ago, MacGill has never played more than nine matches in a row - and only then because Warne was banned for taking drugs. Yet he has still clocked up 198 Test wickets, which places him 13th among those still playing regularly on the international circuit. In any other country, he would be an all-time great. In Australia, he is a slightly tubby, 36-year-old curiosity.
Sure, there have been disciplinary issues, but never at international level, where instinct presumably tells him to behave. Yet if this were a criterion for selection, Warne's career might have been lost to pizza, cigarettes and mobile-phone bills. The reality is that MacGill was born in the wrong country at the wrong time. He denies this, pointing out that Warne has raised the profile for leg-spinners everywhere, but then so might MacGill given the chance. More revealingly, he once suggested that international teams should be allowed to choose from a pool of players who weren't wanted by their own selectors. Who did you have in mind, Stuart?
Cricket purists will tell you that Warne was the better bowler, and that is hard to dispute. But although MacGill's Test average is slightly higher than Warne's (27 to 25), his strike-rate of 51 is staggering for a spinner (Warne's figure of 57 is top-class too). He has given away just 3.16 runs an over, and here he trails Warne, on 2.65, by a distance. But it does not quite tally with his reputation for one bad ball an over.
And what are we to make of the fact that in the five Tests the two men played together at Sydney, the Australian spin bowler's Mecca, MacGill collected 40 wickets at 17 to Warne's 21 at 33? Warne can point to successive 10-wicket hauls in Sri Lanka in 2003-04 while MacGill was scrabbling around for a grand total of five. But in the 16 Tests they have played together, MacGill has claimed 82 wickets at 22, Warne 71 at nearly 31. If Warne really was prickly about turning out in the same side as a man who was both team-mate and rival - and who possessed a bigger-turning leg-break and a more well-disguised googly - it is easy to see why.
Warne, it is true, has played both Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry to MacGill's Jimmy White. But that and his miserable batting are not the only explanations for MacGill's absence from 65 of Australia's Tests since his debut. Only this week we had an insight into MacGill's refreshingly different approach to life as an international sportsman. He cheerfully admitted he was overweight and chuckled at his recent pasting by Matthew Hayden and Andrew Symonds in a state game ("I threw up a few pies - I thought it was part of the team love thing - and they belted me"). With Hogg waiting in the wings for a Test debut, it was hardly a come-and-pick-me plea to the selectors.
But then MacGill's face has never quite fitted. He prefers wine to beer, reads novels - 24 of them on a tour of Pakistan, apparently - and refused to visit Zimbabwe in 2004 on moral grounds at a time when he could hardly afford to pass up the chance of some cheap wickets. His team-mates, backed by their board, looked the other way.
And, over the next few days at the Gabba, the crowd might find themselves distracted too. "If it's not Warney in front of me it's someone else popping their head up, like Hoggy has this week," said MacGill. And now Murali. The shadows are not shrinking yet.
