When the push notification came through, I was with someone who didn’t care.

“Shane Warne’s dead,” I said, staring at the headline.

“Yes,” I said, thinking how inadequate that description was. There is no way of knowing which deaths will knock the wind out of us, or why I found myself standing still on Stroud Green Road, unable to take in the news and keep walking at the same time. I didn’t know Warne personally, beyond a treasured handshake in the Long Room when I was a teenager. He had stopped playing long ago. I couldn’t explain to my friend why I was brought up so short. As ever with cricket, there was too much to say.

It wasn’t just that Warne bowled leg-spin, the most mysterious of the game’s disciplines. Fast bowlers take wickets with terror and basic physics: the ball moves too quickly for the batsmen to do anything about it. Leg spinners must use deceit. It is poker. Will the ball spin, or carry on straight, or bounce higher or lower, or come fast or slow? Nor was it that for a cheeky, chubby blonde boy in the early 90s, relatable figures in elite sport were rare, albeit not as rare as they are now. Nor, later, was it that Warne provided an example of an athlete who got in shape after he retired, in his case under the ministrations of Liz Hurley. No middle-aged bloke could ask for more. Those were all parts of his appeal, but there was a more elusive quality, too.

Warne celebrates &#8216;The Ball of the Century&#8217;, as a despondent Mike Gatting looks on


In the days after Warne’s death, social media and news footage reduced his career to a couple of clips. It’s inevitable with sportsmen. There was the “ball of the century”, of course, the twisting demon of a delivery at Old Trafford in 1993, Warne’s first in Test matches in England, with which he dismissed Mike Gatting and announced himself. Familiarity hasn’t made it less astonishing, the way the ball leaves his hand and drifts faintly to the right before it hits the pitch and shears off to the left, at an angle so astonishingly sharp that it appears to defy physics as well as good sense, before clipping the top of leg stump.

Then a wicket from much later in his career, in a 2011 Big Bash League game, in which technology gave us a rare insight into his genius. As part of the league’s commitment to circus antics, Warne was wearing a microphone, so he could talk to the commentators mid-game. They asked him how he planned to dismiss Brendon McCullum, the swashbuckling Kiwi who was batting. With an earlier ball Warne had drawn McCullum out wide, where he had nearly been caught with a wild swipe. “I reckon he’s trying to go inside out but given what just happened he may try to sweep this,” Warne said, “so I’ll slide this through him a bit quicker…fast.” He did exactly that, sending the ball crashing into McCullum’s stumps.

Warne admitted that the ball against Gatting was a fluke; that he never got one to turn like that again. If you’re going to have a lucky one, the first ball of your first Ashes test, against one of England’s best batsmen, is a good moment to do it. If the ball was blessed by luck, the timing was characteristic of a player who always rose to the occasion. All clips of Warne’s wickets do a disservice to his ability, like reducing Michael Jordan to a dunk compilation or Thierry Henry to his top 10 free-kicks. But the McCullum wicket shows how Warne played batsmen in their heads.

For all his exuberant bonhomie off the field, when he was on the pitch he was a bully. He would chirp, chirrup, sledge. More than anything, he would dominate them with the ball. During the 2005 Ashes, a series in which Warne bowled beautifully in a losing cause, he reduced Ian Bell, one of the most technically gifted young batsmen in England, to a quivering wreck. (Warne’s nickname for Bell, the Shermanator, after the frustrated virgin in the film 

, was as cruelly pinpoint as his bowling.) England had even gone to the trouble of building a special bowling machine to replicate Warne’s range: the leg break, the googly, the slider, the flipper. It made no difference. Bell knew Warne was going to get him out, Warne knew he was going to get him out, and so did the millions watching. It was more like Attenborough than sport, a lion toying with a deer.

The obituaries were full of the usual caveats around Warne’s lifestyle: the booze, the fags, the gambling, the girls. “Not one to be restrained by the smallprint of a nuptial contract,” the 

 wrote, in one of the more elegant euphemisms, “he exhausted his wife’s powers of forgiveness.” This kind of thinking presupposes that these were flaws, off-field discrepancies to be held on the other side of the ledger from his triumphs on the pitch. He must have been a difficult man to be married to. But this lust for life was part of the whole man, inseparable from the way he played the game.

Warne was not a meek servant to cricket. He loved it for what it gave him: fame, riches, women, adoration. Many sportsmen are good at more than one game. Cricket was not Warne’s first love, or even his second. When he was a boy, his heart was set on Australian rules. He was gifted, but not good enough to make it as a professional. He tried tennis, too: again, not quite good enough. It was only with a cricket ball in his large, strong right hand that he found he could do what he wanted. It was only as a cricketer that Warney could be Warney. He embodied sport as art rather than craft. His bowling was an expression of character — mischievous, swaggering, masterful — rather than a mere aggregation of talent and practice.

To find your discipline, and be the best who ever lived at it, with a grin on your face: this is closer to philosophy than sport. The actor, Russell Crowe, Warne’s friend and countryman, another public figure who is no stranger to the odd tinny, mourned his mate’s death. “Woke this morning to the devastating news,” he wrote. “Having a hard time accepting it. Genius player. Grand company. Loyal friend.”

But it was quite a life. To paraphrase one of Crowe’s most famous lines: were we not entertained?

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