Having been floundering on life support for a while, it appeared that the difficult art of leg-spin bowling had died a death when Abdul Quadir played his last Test for Pakistan in Lahore in 1990. The dearth of high-quality wrist spinners at the highest level was abundantly apparent. Yet there was one up-and-coming player who was demanding more and more attention — an Australian young man who was said to possess loads of the nebulous quality called potential. He was from Victoria, and his name was Shane Warne.

Former Australian Captain Ian Chappell reported in The Age newspaper that, “I have been hearing very good reports about a young Victorian leg-spinner called Shane Warne, who is currently at the AIS [Australian Institute of Sport] cricket academy in Adelaide. There aren’t many good leg-spinners in Australia – or the world for that matter – so there is room for somebody with ability, and the young St Kilda man is said to have plenty.”

He did indeed have plenty ability, more perhaps than any bowler of any kind in the entire history of the sport. Few could impart the degree of spin he could. Few operated with his level of accuracy. He made the ball drift, drop, and, at his best, bowled a flipper that outfoxed some of the best batsmen in the game. If he had a weakness as a wrist-spinner it was his googly, which he hardly bowled. But he had so many weapons otherwise that it hardly mattered.

Seven-hundred-and-eight Test wickets at 25.41 and 293 One Day International wickets from 194 games tells a tale of a bowler from the very top drawer. But his statistics were just a part of his allure.

More telling was the manner in which he practised his craft. He was more sorcerer than spin bowler, and appeared to defy logic and physics with regularity. It is, for example, impossible for a ball to gather pace after landing. But his flipper appeared to do just that and many a great batsman has been defeated by its unexpected pace off the surface. The degree of drift and turn he often generated also seemed other-worldly. Yet those were hallmarks of his bowling over a long career.

Perhaps his greatest asset as a player, however, was his mind. He imposed himself on opponents, dominating them as much with his unmatched skills as with guile, bravado, and an incisive cricketing intellect. As good a player as South African batsman Daryll Cullinan was, for instance, he found it difficult to cope with Warne’s offerings, and even admitted to consulting a psychiatrist for help.

This is what Warne had to say about Cullinan while on tour of Australia in 1997-98: “The first Test at Melbourne finally dawned. Adam Bacher fell to a fine slip catch by Mark Taylor and my old mate walked out gingerly. I let him take guard before saying, ‘Daryll, I’ve waited so long for this moment and I’m going to send you straight back to that leather couch.’ A couple balls later I bowled him for a duck. He was more embarrassed than anything else, but those words had clearly unsettled him, and he didn’t take any further part in the Test series.”

His first international outing was not that auspicious as he registered figures of 1/150 off 45 overs. But it didn’t take him long to show his worth.

In his second Test, Allan Border, perhaps against all logic, threw him the ball with Sri Lanka on the verge of victory. Warne repaid his faith with 3/11 off 5.1 overs, enabling Australia to snatch victory by a meagre 16 runs.

But that was just the first of the many unbelievable feats he’d perform in the international game. How can we explain, for example, that his first Ashes delivery, bowled during the 1993 series to Mike Gatting, was dubbed Ball of the Century and was one of the best deliveries ever bowled?

The famed delivery began life inhabiting a line on or about leg stump, drifted farther down leg, landed and turned viciously to evade the batter’s forward prod, and hit the top of his off stump. An unplayable delivery if ever there was one. A bemused Gatting stood in place for a while before trudging off back to the pavilion without a clue as to what had just occurred.

And that delivery wasn’t a fluke either, because he bowled a dominant Shivnarine Chanderpaul with one that turned even more in Sydney in 1997.

Another big turner removed Graham Gooch in Birmingham in 1993, and there were many other indecipherable leg-spinners, top-spinners, flippers, and googlys along the way.

Chosen in 2000 alongside Jack Hobbs, Vivian Richards, Donald Bradman, and Garfield Sobers as one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the 20th century indicates the huge impact he had on the sport. It was deserved recognition for the man who totally mastered what is perhaps cricket’s most challenging vocation. That he also went on to become one of cricket’s most insightful commentators speaks to how thoughtful he was as an observer of the game.

Still, Warne’s career was not all smooth sailing. Like all of us he had flaws, and there were a number of mistakes and mishaps along the way.

He was fined, along with Mark Waugh, for his involvement with a bookie in 1994. In 2003 he was banned, ahead of the World Cup in South Africa, for ingesting a prohibited substance. And he lost the Australian vice-captaincy over a sexting incident with a British nurse in 2004.

But those blotches did not permanently stain a stellar career. And so the entire cricketing community, friend and foe alike, mourned unabashedly when the great man died of a suspected heart attack after being found unresponsive in a hotel room in Thailand. It was a sad day for the sport, and a great loss of one of the most significant personalities to grace a cricket pitch.

Shane Warne will be missed. He made cricket, and our lives, richer.

Garfield Robinson is a Jamaican living in the US who writes on cricket for a few Indian and English publications. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or garfield.v.robinson@gmail.com.