Cricket: Warne's Endless Summer

He has whirred that strong right arm 35,955 times in Test matches. And on 623 occasions - once every six overs, each of which cost him an average 2.61 runs - Shane Warne has taken a wicket. Only Muttiah Muralitharan has a realistic chance of getting close to such numbers.

What is remarkable about The Blond - apart from the potency, the economy and the consistency of his wrist spin - is that, at 36, he retains a thirst for work that is even greater than it was at the start of his career.

At the Rose Bowl, Warne ignored a groin strain to play in Hampshire's final championship game of the season, commitment not ordinarily on tap from some overseas stars in the past. But Warne had a point to prove. Leading from the front on one leg, he orchestrated an emphatic win over the champions Nottinghamshire with an eccentric flourish, at one point on Friday posting nine fielders on the off-side and throwing up tasty morsels for batsmen caught between an urge to go home and not be comprehensively thrashed.

As it happened, Hampshire won by an innings and 188 runs at the end of the third day to finish second in a competition they might have won had Kent not made a daft declaration deal that allowed Nottinghamshire to secure the title last Saturday. Hampshire had been denied a finale on their home ground, and Warne wasn't happy.

Rod Bransgrove, the man who brought Warne to Hampshire and pays no heed to the tabloid storm that follows him everywhere, saw the performance as typical of a captain who has transformed the club.

'What struck me about him when I first met him was what a charismatic person he was,' Bransgrove said, 'such a natural leader - but also the depth of his knowledge of the game. I went to stay with him in Melbourne once and he picked me up at the airport himself. The first place he took me was the St Kilda club, where he hailed from. I was struck by the depth of his roots. He was still incredibly committed to his team. That was the time when I thought I'd like him to one day captain Hampshire. And what a dramatic effect he's had.'

Warne will be at Hampshire 'for at least another three seasons', Bransgrove says. So he's not done with English cricket for a little while yet - might he even play in another Ashes tour here?

It is sobering to recall that he had to be cajoled into becoming a spinner in the first place. Thankfully, for himself and the game, he stumbled into the weird and wonderful world of wrist spin, via the Australian cricket academy in Adelaide, where he met his mentor, Terry Jenner, himself a useful Test leg-spinner - and also a bit of a larrikin. Jenner did much to enthuse the young Victorian tearaway, persuading him to get fit or waste his talent. It was a close-run thing.

In conversation on one of his trips to England to look for and nurture leg-spin in schools and clubs, Jenner explained why Warne matters. 'I sit down with him sometimes and say: "You've been good, Shane - but you've also been bad." And he looks at me as if I'm going to have a go at something he's done privately, and I say: "Because you've been too good."'

Jenner meant Warne had spoilt it for anyone trying to emulate him. They can't. If anyone understands Warne, it is Jenner.

Theirs has been a relationship built on a love of trickery and cunning. It is no coincidence that some of the best slow bowlers in the history of the game have had a bit of the card shark about them, minds that move a click or two faster than others. As Shaun Udal, his Hampshire team-mate who was picked last week by England to tour Pakistan, pointed out, Warne sees things other cricketers cannot.

All of which is useless if the mechanics aren't in order, and that explains Warne's longevity. Few bowlers have reduced the delivery of a cricket ball to such an unfussy yet effective method as Warne. There are no idiosyncrasies in his action, no quirks that can go wrong.

As his compatriot, the biomechanic Brad Langevad explains: 'Good habits are the ones that are best hidden. The safer side of perfection is under-doing rather than over-doing. The position of Shane's trunk, arm and hand are designed for maximum efficiency.'

Warne doesn't really have a run-up; he has a short, deceptively unthreatening stroll followed by an explosion at the crease, the last stride bringing the upper half of his body smoothly and consistently through the same arc, ball after ball, year after year.

Warne's fingers hold the ball firmly but loosely. Along with Stuart MacGill, who turns the ball even more violently, Warne probably owns the strongest fingers in cricket. When he bowls his stock leg-break, he has them stretched with the focus of the release on the third digit. Combined with the angle of his arm and the speed and power of the flick, the ball turns according to Warne's wishes, almost on command. By the time he lets the ball go, he has whipped his right leg through its final push and his chest is square to the crease; the arm, twisted in the motion of getting the wrist in the right position, is pulled down and across from an angle of 45 degrees - any higher, and he loses turn. His left arm drags him into the follow-through, which is often accompanied by a tell-tale grunt of effort, before he finishes upright and glaring down the wicket at his intended victim. In its way, it is as frightening as facing Brett Lee.

What Warne has managed in his 13 years as a Test cricketer is to break his bowling down to its simplest components. There aren't many flippers or wrong 'uns now, the occasional slider and top-spinner. He has made his stock ball, the leg-break, his most dangerous purely by ratcheting the amount of turn up or down as he sees fit, and concealing the adjustment from the batsman. It is near-impossible to pick the one that jags right to left up to a recorded 31 inches from the one that turns considerably less - or from the one that goes straight on, the lbw ball that so bamboozled Ian Bell this summer.

Warne, it is widely agreed, has the finest cricket brain in the game. He ought to be captain of his country, but he is not, for all the wrong reasons. No doubt he sees the Rose Bowl and his nights out with Kevin Pietersen as a refuge from his personal problems back in Melbourne, where his estranged wife and children will rebuild their lives without him. But he is also addicted to his art.

Warne, like all geniuses, is obsessed with the gift that makes him great, and he delights in refining his many tricks - although the differences between some of them are so subtle as to be barely discernible, either by batsman, commentators or those who pay to get in. Like Muhammad Ali, he creates magical illusions.

As with all the best spin bowling, it is the delivery before that often gets the wicket. That is the one that plants doubt. Warne does this better than anyone else because he is so accurate. Each ball asks a question. There is no rest - and no certainty. It is only when it is too late, when the humming bomb grips the turf and spits, that the batsman is made aware of his dilemma. In that split second, he can either prod with bat or pad, lunge wildly or pray that it passes like a torpedo sliding just wide of a slow-moving juggernaut.

Warne could well bowl on until he is 40, if his right shoulder can stand the strain. It has already needed an operation, but it held up well under a serious workload this summer. With Glenn McGrath sidelined through misfortune and physical frailty at key moments, Warne carried Australia. At Edgbaston he was awesome. He took 10 wickets in the match and bowled a marathon spell on the Saturday when Andrew Flintoff was changing the course of the game.

Outsiders and newcomers looking in - of whom there were thousands this summer - might scoff at suggestions that Warne has a physically demanding job. But he does. The pressure on his body is immense, which the Australian coach, John Buchanan, recognises. 'As for the physical strain he puts on himself at this point in his career, of course we worry about it,' he says. 'He does too. But at the moment he's going well. He knows how to manage himself through the course of a game, and through the course of a series.

'He's at a very mature stage of his career, obviously, but I'd suggest that if he keeps going the way he has been, he's got plenty of wickets in front of him.'

There have been several older spinners in Test cricket, but few have operated at the highest level for as long as Warne. He played his first Test (coming on after Steve Waugh and taking just one for 150) in 1992 against India in Sydney, and will probably be waiting for England when they tour Australia in 14 months. What happens after that is in the hands of the man himself. He can bowl for as long as it fascinates him. As of now, it is a consuming interest. 'We're privileged to be watching him,' Mike Brearley remarked when we sat down at Lord's to watch the start of that wondrous series.

Buchanan echoed Brearley's sentiment 14 weeks later, on the Friday of the final Test at the Oval, by which time Warne was on his way to taking a record 40 wickets in the series. 'Sometimes,' Buchanan said, 'you take for granted what individuals do. And Warne has an unbelievable habit of turning up and doing something special. You can become a bit blasé about that.'

There was never any danger of the cricket-watching public taking Warne for granted. From the day he bowled Mike Gatting 12 years ago with 'the ball of the century', his first delivery in an Ashes match, the loud and garrulous kid from Ferntree Gully has held a special place in local affections. The series just gone, he engaged in virtually non-stop banter with the crowd - most of it amiable, some of it more pointed. Warne might look like a smiling lifeguard, but he has edginess too.

'My life is a soap opera,' he said earlier this year, when his private life burst on to the front pages again. It wasn't in the Clarence Darrow class as a defence, but it was on the money. He may or may not be doing much in the way of personal rehabilitation, but he at least acknowledges he is no saint.

One of the most encouraging aspects of this crazy summer has been the erosion of cant. Flintoff got royally drunk at the celebrations after the Oval Test and embedded himself in the hearts of millions. Warne, in a slightly different way, has survived the scrutiny of the tabloid moralists.

If ever they needed a bloody nose for their intrusions it was at the end of a series that made a nation smile. And it came last week in a poll conducted by the Cricinfo website. You might have thought Flintoff was a lay-down special as the most popular cricketer in the country. Not quite. Asked to pick a composite team of the season, 4,524 voted for Freddie; two more voted for Warne. And that's the finest compliment we can pay him.