Greatest test XI of the modern era

#9 Shane Warne

Shane Warne brought glamour back to leg spin

Shane Warne, the leg spin maestro from Australia is one of modern cricket’s most enthralling players. At a time when the difficult art of leg spin was in the doldrums, Warne revived it with his beautiful bowling. Warne was a prodigious turner of the ball and spun a web of trickery around the minds of the batsmen.

He possessed wonderful flight, which teased the batsmen and lured them out of the safety of their crease only to be bowled or stumped. In a nutshell, Warne mastered every aspect of leg spin.

Warne began his test career in 1992 against India in horrendous fashion with figures of 1/150, but it did not take too long to showcase his wizardry. His ball to Mike Gatting in the 1993 Ashes series which pitched outside the leg stump but spun remarkably to hit Gatting’s off stump remains immortal in the history of cricket.

Since that ball, aptly called the ‘ball of the century’, Warne captured the imagination of cricket lovers all over the world and scaled many peaks. On the field or off it, Warne always hogged the limelight.

With a haul of 708 wickets in 145 matches, Warne is next only to Muttiah Muralitharan in the list of the highest wicket takers in tests and his leg spin is too magical to keep him out of our ‘greatest eleven of the modern era.’