These days, getting intelligent, dispassionate comment from Shane Warne is like using Fox News to form an opinion on the state of the world. But, on the back of some staggeringly hyperbolic nonsense from him this week, I switched on ITV4 on Thursday in time to catch the batting of the Rajasthan Royals' Yusuf Pathan. It was truly comical.
In the space of half an hour, he had been dropped twice, hit on the head, swatted haplessly at the numerous short deliveries that came his way, and, before he was lumberingly run out, cleared his left leg out of the way and agriculturally clumped successive deliveries massively over wide long-on for what are known not as sixes (for one day, make no mistake, Lalit Modi will upgrade their value according to distance travelled) but as DLF maximums. Imagine going to the cinema expecting to see De Niro at his finest and instead getting Terminator 3, and this was it.
He looked a mediocre cumbersome batsman, who I discovered, averages just over 20 both in his 23 ODI innings and 11 Twenty20 innings for India. His assets would seem to be little else but a good eye, considerable strength, and a decent blade that together contrive to propel vast distances anything pitched in his own half. An IPL natural in fact who will bring joy to those who see little else to the game.
So how, last weekend, he managed to score 100 from 37 deliveries is anyone's guess. Presumably he just got lucky in that freakish way that sometimes happens. Not that it stopped Warne from his gushing IPL promotion campaign. Was this one of the best innings seen in the three years of IPL? Up a bit. OK, the best IPL innings, better even than Brendon McCullum's competition pipe-opener, for example? Higher still. Best T20 ever? Best one‑day innings?
Dear God, Warnie, forget the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd and all that living-in-the-moment adrenaline stuff. Forget, for a minute, your vested interest in promoting IPL, or even making a team-mate feel even better about himself. Just think before you open your mouth. Nope.
"I've played this game for 20-odd years," Warne was quoted as saying. "I've seen Sachin Tendulkar smash bowlers all around the park plenty of times and I've seen some wonderful players, but this is probably the best innings I've ever seen." What utter tosh. Just consider for a moment what the term "best" or "greatest" means. Regarding an innings, there are criteria to be met. Context is everything. What were the circumstances in which it was played, and what were the consequences as a result? What would they have been had the innings not been played? Who were the opposition? What was the condition of the pitch? Was it technically excellent? Did it require great mental strength? Will it stand the test of time as a masterpiece?
Personal recollections of memorable one-day innings that fit the context include World Cup final hundreds from Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist, Tendulkar's recent double century for India, and Richards's remarkable undefeated 189 at Old Trafford, yet almost invariably we are drawn to Test cricket when making assessments of worth. Thus, the greatest innings in my experience was Graham Gooch's 154 not out (out of 252) against Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson on a nasty Headingley pitch in 1991, without which England would have been annihilated but instead won.
Now, leaving aside Warne's career with Rajasthan Royals, Victoria and Hampshire, there was also the matter of 145 Tests and 195 ODIs for Australia. He has played with and against the very best of the past two decades. Four of Tendulkar's 10 centuries against Australia were scored when Warne was playing. Then consider the numerous wonderful innings played by fellow Australians, brilliant batsmen, geniuses some of them, such as the Waugh twins, Ponting, Matthew Hayden and Gilchrist.
But, above all, consider those played against Australia during Warne's time, for it is only from a position at the bowling crease that the ultimate assessment of merit can be ascertained. Tendulkar aside, Warne was playing when Brian Lara announced his brilliance to the world in 1993 with 277 at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He was tweaking away when VVS Laxman kept clipping him on the up out of the Eden Gardens rough in making an unbelievable 281 that turned a match, and a series. And he was there when Lara made an unbeaten match-winning fourth-innings 153 – with Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Stuart MacGill in the attack – in Bridgetown in 1999.
Yet for recent public consumption Warne reckons that a brief flogerama in a domestic T20 competition, on a dinky ground, against Ryan McLaren, Rajagopal Satish, Ali Murtaza and Sanath Jayasuriya knocks them into a cocked hat? He knows it is rubbish, really, which makes it all the worse. Perhaps I am too sensitive, but I find it offensive: in saying such things, whatever his motive, Warne is offering up an insult to a game that he once graced and made him the undisputable legend he is. It is not even funny.
