No man is an island and no team is either. The team you support is only part of the equation. Opponents elevate a match. Opponents like Shane Warne.

Many words have been spoken and written about Shane Warne in recent weeks; about why he was such an incredible leg-spinner; about how he was such an ingenious and relentless competitor.

We’re not really going to get into that. What we want to talk about is the impact that had. How it made him just about the most exciting cricketer there’s ever been, even when – in fact especially when – you weren’t on his side.

What might happen

When you’re watching cricket, the excitement you feel comes not from what will happen, but from what might happen.

We remember a T20 match from 2009 when South Africa’s Graeme Smith and Loots Bosman put on 170 in 13 overs against an England attack that couldn’t find a way of preventing them from slamming sixes over cow corner.

It was incredible hitting and among the least exciting passages of play we’ve ever seen. The only uncertainties were just how many sixes they’d hit between them (15) and whether one or the other might eventually get caught in the outfield. (Smith was eventually caught at long on, Bosman at deep midwicket.)

Conversely, Shane Warne’s whole modus operandi hinged on broadening possibilities such that you started thinking that anything could happen.

Warne said he always used to try and really rip a leg break when he first came on to bowl. This wasn’t to try and dismiss the batsman – although sometimes it did – it was really just to sow a seed of doubt. He wanted to maximise the range of what his opponent thought was possible. The bigger the difference between a big leg-break and a straight one, the harder it is to know how to play.

Put yourself in the batter’s position. If what at first looks like the same delivery could eventually arrive either here or *all the way over there* then that’s kind of tricky to counter. How do you make your initial movements when you most likely have two entirely different shots in mind?

Throw in the outside possibility of a googly or some other most-likely-fictional delivery you’ve heard rumours about and the possibilities become greater and shot selection harder still.

We wrote about this last year after England were annihilated in a pink ball Test in Ahmedabad. It’s funny to read that back now. What does it say about Warne that the best way of explaining the perils of a two-day Test were to liken it to how he went about his business in every game? The lethal skid in that match? It was basically Warne’s flipper, wasn’t it?

How Shane Warne helped create the 2005 Ashes

Warne was great during the 2005 Ashes, but we’ll come to that in a bit because that’s only a fragment of the point we want to make here.

There’s a widespread misconception that the 2005 Ashes began on July 21, 2005 at Lord’s. People tend to look back on the series as comprising the on-field events that took place between then and September 12 at the Oval. This is completely incorrect. And now we’re going to tell you why.

For most England fans, the 2005 Ashes began in 1993 because that’s when we met our first character. That’s where the story begins. It was a pretty tidy opening scene for a drama too because it really got the audience’s attention.

Let’s recap.

A young, blond leg-spinner stands at the end of his mark. We are told that he is significant by the newspapers and the commentators, but we don’t just instantly accept that. It’s something we need to judge for ourselves.

Our first impression is that he looks kind of pudgy. He is fidgeting with the ball and awaiting his moment. When that moment comes, it at first seems underwhelming.

The blond young man basically just walks in. In years to come, this will become drama in itself, but for now it’s just a walk. There is a quick trot and then he releases the ball. The delivery looks like it’s going down the leg-side and then swerves even further that way, like a wayward in-swinger. It’s a ropey loosener from some nobody who we’ll all have forgotten about within a year.

Isn’t it?

It is not. At the moment the ball pitches, magic happens. The furiously spinning ball grips and corners impossibly, redirecting itself towards the stumps. The swerve that had looked like compounding an existing problem is in fact a strength, drawing the batter – England’s Mike Gatting – down the wrong line. The ball evades his bat and pecks the bail on the cheek as it passes by, unseating it from the stumps. Suddenly there’s only one sad, pudgy cricketer on display and it isn’t Shane Keith Warne.

It will take many years to appreciate even half of the richness, depth and complexity of this new character and that – plain and simple – is why no other sport can offer anything to match the cast of a cricket match. It’s not the tabloid stings and the bad behaviour. It’s not even the skills necessarily – although clearly they’re mandatory. It’s the fact that the long hours of a Test career allow you to get to know people and learn how they react in different situations.

If you follow cricket, caricatures become three-dimensional people. As well as their strengths and weaknesses, you get a feeling for what will inspire them. You can spot when they’re nervous. You can sense when they’re desperate. You know them. You have technicolour heroes and villains of equally searing clarity. Both contribute to the excitement of a match.

The main reason the 2005 Ashes was so powerful was not because of what happened in the five Test matches. The 2005 Ashes was powerful because of what preceded it. That’s what gave weight to proceedings and what influenced on-field events. Everything that led up to the series is what gave the cricket its power to move you.

When we played conkers as a child, the winning conker accumulated all the points of the defeated conker. Similarly, England’s 2005 Ashes team didn’t just beat Australia. They beat one of the greatest Australia teams of all time; a team that had been routinely humiliating them since 1989.

They play the Ashes every five goddamn minutes these days, but they won’t get another opportunity to get close to the 2005 series until one side or the other has first spent 16 years getting stomped on by one of the greatest cricket teams ever assembled.

England beat a whole squadron of supervillains in 2005 and Shane Warne was the greatest of them all.

Because it wasn’t even like he was cut down when they were finally beaten. If anything he added further lustre to his reputation, displaying a will and ability to compete even when things weren’t going his team’s way. Playing in those Australia sides, these were qualities he’d rarely had an opportunity to display and they were qualities that many of his storied team-mates struggled to unearth.

Warne had always had a preternatural ability to redirect cricket matches. Now we saw more clearly that this was allied to the sheer delusion of always believing he could do so, no matter what the circumstances.

He did this the bat, turning 137-7 at Edgbaston in pursuit of 282 into 220-8. In so doing, he contributed to what will probably always remain our ultimate benchmark for sporting excitement.

More significantly, he did it with the ball too, most notably with his 4-31 in the second innings at Trent Bridge.

This was Warne in his purest form, delivering a performance that was nothing to do with the pitch and not all that much to do with the deliveries he bowled either. It was all about smothering a batting line-up through sheer force of will.

England had made 477 in their first innings and were chasing just 129 to win and yet somehow that target became utterly mountainous.

To provide further context, Australia had just made 387 following on. The pitch was unarguably decent – Warne himself had just made 45 off 42 balls. But he paralysed the batters. Paralysed the nation, in fact. If you watch the footage of Steve Harmison waiting to bat, thinking the entire Ashes is going to hang on his batting ability, you see a pretty good representation of how every England fan was feeling.

It was hell. But in time you realise that without that hell, the catharsis of victory just isn’t the same.

That is what a good opponent can do. Shane Warne was the best opponent.

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You’ve no doubt seen the shocking news that Shane Warne’s died. This is by no means the first gasp he’s induced from us, but it’s by far the least welcome.

We will, of course, write something longer in due course, but for now we just want to acknowledge what a unique cricketer he was. Warne was the only bowler we have ever seen who could make us feel nauseous with nerves when two England batters had put on a hundred partnership and the pitch was doing nothing.

Bowled, Shane.

Rest in peace, Shane.

Can we talk about bowlers’ run-ups? We’ve picked out three great ones. They’re not necessarily our favourites, but we feel like each one says something in particular about how bowlers get to the crease and what we as viewers feel as they’re doing so. But before that, please can we talk about Jurassic Park for a bit, because that’s the best way of explaining why run-ups are important.

There is a reason why the first Jurassic Park is good and why all the rest of the Jurassic Park films are not so good. You can only have a fantastical world of dinosaurs revealed to you once.

With that in mind, let’s compare the original film with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which is, at the time of writing, the latest.

The slow build

Tell you what you don’t see for ages in the first Jurassic Park? A scary dinosaur. Not properly anyway.

In the opening scene, you see people reacting to a dinosaur and you sometimes see things from the dinosaur’s perspective. You see someone being killed by what you presume is a dinosaur and you see a dinosaur’s eye. But you don’t get a nice clear look at a scary dinosaur.

Steven Spielberg keeps his powder dry. After that scene, we slowly meet our human characters before being introduced to the concept of the park and how it works. We see a few dinosaurs towards the end of this bit and it is a big moment – but we only see herbivores.

At the start of their park tour, the visitors go to the Velociraptor enclosure. Guess what we don’t see at the Velociraptor enclosure? That’s right, a Velociraptor. We see a cow being lowered into the pen. We see trees rustling and we hear the cow being killed, but we don’t actually see a thing.

The rest of the tour is a big damp squib until Dennis Nedry switches off the power in the middle of a thunderstorm. This is when we finally get to see a scary dinosaur and even then it’s drip-fed to us to increase the suspense.

First we get the water vibrating in the cup – a moment that is genuinely more terrifying than anything that happens in any of the subsequent films.

“Do you feel that?”

After that, we see a missing goat. Then we see a claw on a conspicuously unelectrified fence.

Then we see a Tyrannosaurus’s head. Shortly afterwards, it attacks.

So it’s only about an hour into the best dinosaur film ever made that you finally get to see a scary dinosaur.

Contrast that with the opening scene of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which is a veritable masterpiece of premature bolt-shooting.

As a measure of how stupid this film is, it opens with a team who are trying to collect DNA from the Indominus Rex carcass at the bottom of the park’s lagoon. The Indominus Rex is a made-up hybrid dinosaur which combines Tyrannosaurus Rex, Velociraptor and Gigantosaurus, among others. We put it to you that if you can’t make dinosaurs scary without making up a new, fictional dinosaur, you have no business making dinosaur films.

After just a few seconds, we see a silhouette of a big scary underwater dinosaur.

Just after the one-minute mark, we see a big scary terrestrial dinosaur.

At 1m20s we see the Tyrannosaurus roar and attack.

At 2m40s a gargantuan Mosasaurus leaps from the water and ingests a lad dangling on a rope ladder that is trailing from a helicopter.

What follows is another two hours of much the same thing interspersed with scenes where far less is happening.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a woeful film.

This stark difference between Jurassic Park and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom tells us something. It tells us that anticipation is important. Anticipation can, in fact, be quite a big part of the fun.

The bowler runs in…

Nothing happens in cricket until the bowler releases the ball. In many ways, until that ball is released, cricket isn’t actually taking place.

It’s a cue, though, isn’t it? It’s the cue in fact. When the bowler runs in, it’s time to pay attention.

So while the run-up is not actually a meaningful thing in terms of the scoreboard, this ostensibly mundane lead-up to cricket-actually-taking-place is very important. It’s a little crescendo.

The bowler’s run-up is when tension mounts. While usually not a tremendous amount happens, the fact is every big, dramatic, unforgettable cricket moment was preceded by someone running in to bowl.

As fans, we appreciate this fact on an unconscious, fundamental level and so, whether we know it or not, we build relationships with different bowlers’ run-ups.

Because they’re all different, aren’t they? Even in these days of scientific coaching, every bowler approaches the crease in a slightly different way. You don’t need to look any further than the current England team for proof of this.

Think of the rhythmic-yet-controlled straight lines of Jofra Archer’s approach. Archer moves like a silken robot, whereas his fellow fast bowler Mark Wood hustles in with bandy-armed urgency. Even without his old triple-jumper backward-step-and-push at the start, Wood’s run-up is distinct.

Stuart Broad is all elbows and high knees. Jimmy Anderson has the bit at the start where he dips his head down (presumably to look for his mark) so that it looks like he’s going to ram someone. Ben Stokes side-to-sides the ball in both hands before he properly gets going.

You can pick almost anyone and easily spot something that’s uniquely theirs to latch onto. But the truth is that some bowlers’ run-ups are more memorable than others.

Shane Warne

Run-ups are, first and foremost, for the benefit of the bowler. They are designed – or evolve – to get him or her into the right position and with the right momentum to do the actual bowling bit.

However, a secondary effect is that run-ups also have an impact on the batsman. The slow build of a very good bowler’s approach to the crease can create an almost pavlovian anxiety in the mind if you’re particularly fearful of what’s to come.

This is most obviously true for fast bowlers where there’s a real ‘calm before the storm’ vibe as they bear down on you. Michael Holding’s nickname of Whispering Death acknowledges both aspects of this rather nicely (which is just one reason why it’s a far better nickname than Stokesy or Woakesy or Rooty or Broady).

Batting is a reactive activity where conscious thought can terminally slow your movements. The long thinking time provided by a fast bowler’s run-up creates a protracted opportunity for the nervous of disposition to second-guess what’s to come and in so doing tangle their own synapses.

With their far shorter runs, spinners don’t benefit from this so much. However, Shane Warne neatly claimed the same advantage through the simple method of adding a sedate, protracted, walking prefix to his deliveries – a pre-amble, if you will.

Warne would take a couple of stuttering steps to hit his mark and then he would just start walking. He had about six or seven ostensibly pointless slo-mo steps during which he failed to do anything at all.

Warne’s run-up proper – the functional bit where he actually started accelerating and bringing the ball back – was incredibly short, but it took a confusingly long time to get to that. He’d no doubt argue there was some biomechanical reason for the walking phase; that it took that many steps to ensure he was balanced and moving smoothly. We’re pretty confident it was somewhere close to 99 per cent bluff, bluster and theatricality though.

Even as a fan, there were times we felt physically sick with nervousness while watching Warne bowl. Those half dozen steps were a big part of that because waiting for something to happen is a major contributor to the tension that makes cricket so great.

Imagine it’s a big moment. A wicket now would be the kiss of death for your team. The opposition captain brings the fielders in. He takes a while about it. He tweaks. He fine-tunes. The batsman waits. The bowler stands at the end of his mark, spinning himself catches. Finally everyone’s ready and the batsman takes his guard. Something’s about to happen. You brace yourself. You feel fidgety.

The bowler begins his run up. At a slow, even pace, he starts to walk. Your heart-rate climbs.

This is how cricket can hit you so hard.

Shoaib Akhtar

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the run-up that terrifies because of its obvious physical wildness. Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were our favourite fast bowlers, but when it comes to run-ups, neither can really match their quite ludicrous successor in the Pakistan side, Shoaib Akhtar.

Everyone has their favourite fast bowler run-up. If you like someone else’s more than Shoaib’s then great, good on you. We’re not here to argue with you. But surely we can at least agree that his was a very good one.

Because it ticks so many boxes, doesn’t it? It’s almost an archetype.

Think of when you first learned to bowl. You almost certainly tried to bowl as quickly as you could and in your efforts to do so, you no doubt ran in from comically far away.

Most of us ditch the fast bowling when we realise we aren’t that quick and even those of us who persist with it ditch the 100-yard run-up once we’ve realised it’s counterproductive.

Shoaib Akhtar stuck with both. Shoaib’s run-up said: “I am a fast bowler. I am here to bowl fast. Brace yourself for the fastest motherfucking bowling you are ever likely to face.”

A surprisingly large proportion of fast bowlers barely run at all. There are those who jog and then sling and even the more rhythmic bowlers tend to settle on a steady tempo trot. Shoaib sprinted. He believed that to bowl quickly, you have to run quickly. So he started pretty much at the sightscreen and ran as fast as he could, his hair flapping like laundry caught on the wing of a fighter jet.

The other great thing about Shoaib’s run-up was his bandy arms. Particularly as he neared the crease, he ran with them slightly away from his body. This, combined with his baggy three-quarter length sleeves resulted in the classic feline ‘make yourself look big’ intimidation technique.

“Looks like this one’s going to be an effort ball,” thought the batsman, every single delivery.

And every single delivery he was correct.

Bob Willis

The great thing about run-ups is that as much as sports science might try and push bowlers in one direction or another, they remain idiosyncratic. There is a reason why Bob Willis’s 43-pace approach is considered one of the classics.

Mitchell Johnson said he felt (quite understandably) sheepish about going jogging in his local park with a cricket ball in his hand. Clearly Johnson didn’t do that just for the fun of it. Running with a cricket ball is not normal running. It is unbalanced and done in the constant awareness of a looming sideways twist.

So symmetry be damned!

“His run-up was intimidating but slightly absurd,” concluded Wisden upon Willis’s retirement, making specific reference to a trailing right arm that pumped across his backside, “like a frenzied jockey in the home straight.”

This wonkiness combined with a comically long, curved approach to create a run-up that you’d brand ‘inimitable’ if it wasn’t for the fact that it remains among the most imitated, even today. (Russell Jackson did a good piece on curved run-ups, by the way. Apparently Alan Ross called Merv Hughes’s a “short-stepping, mincing run-up, rather as if a lobster was nipping at his ankles,” which is a very great description and also completely accurate.)

Willis’s wasn’t a run-up designed with computer software. It was one that he grew into and around. A natural, amorphous thing that could sometimes stretch or constrict, resulting in no-balls. He delivered 939 of those in Test cricket, apparently – a figure his friend Paul Allott reckoned equated to around 50 extra miles.

This one time Mike Brearley told Willis to forget about the no-balls and just bowl quickly. Willis took eight rather memorable wickets and towed that ball in behind him before every one.

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Shane Warne said he always used to try and really rip a leg break when he first came on to bowl. This wasn’t to try and dismiss the batsman – although sometimes it did – it was really just to sow a seed of doubt. Warne wanted to maximise the range of what his opponent thought was possible.

This is what sharp spin does. It expands possibilities.

Enough turn

Some people say you only need to turn the ball the width of the bat to find the edge. This is sort of true. But there’s a ceiling to how threatening you can be if that’s the maximum deviation you can muster.

Facing a bowler who turns the ball ‘just enough’, the batsman will probably feel pretty confident in his choice of shot whether the ball turns or goes straight.

Conversely, if what at first looks like the same delivery could arrive at the batsman here or *all the way over there* then the same batsman is most likely making his initial movements with two entirely different shots in mind.

Throw in a googly or some other kind of delivery that spins the other way and you increase the range of possibilities further. Suddenly the batsman is half-playing three shots as the ball travels from the bowler’s hand.

That’s when batsmen start looking like idiots and that’s why wrist spin is great.

Extra skid

The amount the ball turns increases the range of possibilities. But that’s just one variable. Deliveries can also arrive at different speeds.

To a very great extent, speed comes from the hand. But as with turn or late swing, much of the danger comes with changes in pace as the ball pitches – particularly if there is a lot of variation.

Batsmen are like drummers. We don’t just mean that their job is hitting things. They’re also very rhythmical creatures.

When a batsman is ‘in’ and seeing it like some sort of ball that is famously larger than a cricket ball, a large part of the apparent ease of batting is because they’ve found a rhythm. After facing a lot of deliveries, they get a very precise feel for how long it will take for the ball to arrive at them after pitching and their body starts to work to this time signature.

But what if that timing varies? What if it varies markedly? And what if that marked variation also coincides with marked variation in how much the ball turns?

The all-rounder’s view

Speaking after the two-day day-night Test in Ahmedabad, Joe Root said he felt that the thick shiny lacquer on the pink ball had been a more significant thing than the pitch.

“I honestly think the ball was a big factor in this wicket – the fact the plastic coating, the hardness of the seam compared to the red SG meant it gathered pace off the wicket,” he said.

“If it hit the shiny side and didn’t hit the seam it almost gathered [speed]. A lot of those wickets on both sides, the LBW and bowleds, were due to being done for pace beaten on the inside.

“If you look at some of the replays, batsmen probably ended up in the right position but because it was gathering pace off the wicket it was difficult.

“Credit to Axar [Patel] in particular – I think he exploited that really well and found a very good method on that surface.”

What Root is basically saying here is that even if the pitch were true and spun consistently, the ball resulted in unmanageable variation.

Two deliveries that looked the same – and which may even have been bowled in the same way – could arrive at the batsman completely differently. One would arrive early and straight and the other would arrive much later and wider.

There are things a batsman can do to try and mitigate that, and – as Root said – there are also ways to bowl where you can better exploit that. As such, you can argue it’s still a fair contest between the two teams.

There is no real route to success for batsmen though. By playing a different way the odds can be shifted from terrible to bad, but they can’t really be improved much above that.

Unpredictably varied speed combines with unpredictably varied turn to increase the range of possible outcomes beyond what it’s credible to counter.

That would seem a valid criticism of using a highly lacquered pink ball on a pitch offering good turn – that for even a good batsman, it’s a puzzle with no real solution.

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3 minute readThe frustrating thing about reality TV programmes is that when someone says something interesting, there’s no-one there to ask the obvious follow-up questions.

When he appeared on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in 2016, Shane Warne expressed his belief that humans, “couldn’t do” the pyramids.

“You couldn’t pull those ropes, huge bits of brick and make it perfectly symmetrical,” he said. “Couldn’t do it. So who did it?”

Who indeed?

Aliens, according to Warne. And he doesn’t stop there. He also believes that humans, “started from aliens.”

The plasticated ex-legspinner has little time for the theory of evolution – so little time, in fact, that he hasn’t even bothered finding out any of the details.

“If we’ve evolved from monkeys, then why haven’t those ones evolved?” he asked.

So rather than reading a book or googling ‘evolution’ at some point during his 46 years on this earth, Warne instead invested his time devising his own Chariots of the Gods type theory of origin.

Well here at King Cricket, we’re not Shane Warne. When we hear a theory, we want to scrutinise it. If humans were ‘started’ by aliens, Shane, then which aliens?

Was it the dude from Alien Infiltration?

Because if so, we’d question that. Alien Infiltration dude is massively homicidal. And not in a ‘righting the wrongs of my species’ kind of way. He just seems to kill on a whim.

Was it Ree Yees from Star Wars?

Again, we doubt it. Ree Yees comes across as little more than a thug; a sniggering yes-man who hangs around with Jabba the Hutt, laughing at his jokes. He just doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to create life.

Also, if Ree Yees were the creator of humanity, would he have allowed us to lose an idol in his likeness when we catapulted it using the branch of a conifer tree back when we were 10?

Probably not.

Was it Lord Buckethead?

Come on Shane, think! In Gremloids, Lord Buckethead only found his way to earth by accident. You’d think he’d have known where he was if he’d created a species here.

Was it the Engineers from Prometheus?

This is what you’re thinking of, isn’t it, Shane? You watched Prometheus and thought it was a documentary.

It’s an odd species that routinely describes Shane Warne as a genius.

First published in February 2016.

Specialist bowlers having to bat is one of the greatest things in the world because batting is absolutely nothing like bowling. It is like a javelin thrower training for years and years to perfect their art only to turn up at the Olympics and be told that they also have to play tennis. This is precisely why it’s interesting to ponder which bowler has been best at batting.

We often talk about the top six in cricket. Whether or not these players do other things as well, the top six batsmen are first and foremost judged on how many runs they score.

There’s a pretty good chance that number seven will be the wicketkeeper. Wicketkeepers are judged on their batting too – in large part because batting’s easier to measure than wicketkeeping. People often say that everything changed for wicketkeepers because of Adam Gilchrist but the truth is they were expected to score runs long before him.

Run-scoring wasn’t the only reason why you picked a wicketkeeper, but it was a very big part of selectors’ thinking. These days, you get people like Jonny Bairstow, who’s at times forced Jos Buttler into becoming a specialist number seven batsman by claiming a spot further up the order.

So the top seven is a thing too.

The top eight is not a thing. Not really.

You get all-rounders and you get bowlers who can bat, but once you get down to number eight, batting ability is very much a secondary consideration when picking your team. You might think about it a little, but really number eight is the first player who is not picked for their batting.

This means that number eight is the most exciting batting position of all.

One of Test cricket’s greatest strengths is that in every single match a bunch of people who cannot do a thing are obliged to do exactly that thing at an elite level. This is insane and comical and far, far, far more exciting than watching the people who can do that same task really well. (Read the ‘The other hero’ section of our piece about Ben Stokes, Jack Leach and Headingley 2019 for a bit more on why this is.)

For now, all we need to know is that number eight is the sweetspot; the point at which we find the best Test batsmen who weren’t picked to bat.

So who was best? Here are the candidates.

MS Dhoni

MS Dhoni batted at eight on 11 occasions. He made two hundreds and four fifties and averaged 70. At this point we feel obliged to inform you that MS Dhoni is not a number eight – and not just because he’s a wicketkeeper and therefore ineligible according to the criteria we’ve rather vaguely laid out in our lengthy preamble.

Dhoni made 51 not out the first time he batted at eight, against Sri Lanka at Delhi in 2005. However, he’d batted at seven in the first innings and only got pushed down in the second innings when India crazily but utterly successfully promoted Irfan Pathan to opener. (He made 92).

Dhoni made 92 himself against Australia at Mohali in 2008, but Ishant Sharma had been nightwatchman, so that doesn’t really count either. (Ishant made 9.)

He also made a couple of hundreds. He made 132 not out against South Africa at Kolkata in 2010, but batted behind Amit Mishra; and he made 144 against the West Indies at the same ground in 2011, but again batted behind Ishant Sharma. (In an elite bout of nightwatchmanning, Ishant made a golden duck. Top work, Ishant.)

In short, while Dhoni sometimes batted at number eight, he was never picked to bat at number eight, so he is not a number eight.

Mahmudullah

The batsman with the highest average when batting at number eight who’s also played a reasonable number of games in that position is Bangladesh’s Mahmudullah. Mahmudullah averages 40.75 in 18 innings and has also made a hundred.

But again, this is unsatisfactory because Mahmudullah has always been a better batsman than bowler. With all-rounder Shakib Al Hasan and wicketkeeper Mushfiqur Rahim above him, you can credibly argue that when batting at eight he has essentially been more of a displaced number six.

Mahmudullah has batted higher than number eight more often than he’s batted at number eight. This in itself should not disqualify him – some players have improved their batting enough that they have later earned selection in a way that they didn’t earlier in their careers.

What’s more damning is that although he’s batted at nine three times, each of those occasions required the intervention of a nightwatchman. What we’re saying here is that being picked to bat at nine would in a weird way have legitimised Mahmudullah’s case to be considered an authentic number eight – but this has never truly happened.

The jury is split and quite a few of them think that Mahmudullah isn’t a number eight.

Daniel Vettori

The highest Test run-scorer at number eight is New Zealand’s Dan Vettori. He made 2,227 runs batting in that spot and made four hundreds and 13 fifties.

Vettori’s case is a strong one because he only very gradually acquired all-rounder status. For the majority of his career he was selected on the basis of his bowling with his batting really just a welcome bonus.

The figures bear this out. Vettori had 67 innings at number eight and his next most frequented spot was number nine where he batted 53 times. He only batted 18 times at six and batted more times at 10 (14 times) than seven (12 times).

But is he a legitimate number eight? Or was he too good?

Shane Warne

The batsman who scored most runs at number eight without ever making a hundred was of course Shane Warne. In 113 innings he made 2,005 runs at 19.09, including 11 fifties.

This seems like the archetypal record for a number eight – a guy who can make fifties but not hundreds who is better than most of the bowlers but who is definitely not a batsman.

But what if there were someone who did much the same thing only better?

Chaminda Vaas

Chaminda Vaas made 1,913 runs in 98 Test innings at number eight at an average of 25.17. He made eight fifties and one hundred.

When we tried to work out which Test nation’s top five wicket takers would form the most balanced attack, we took batting into consideration, imposing a ‘multiple Test hundreds’ clause to our definition of an all-rounder. There have been freakish one-off hundreds, but you’re not going to fluke two. By this rationale, Vaas is a bowler, because the hundred he made at number eight is the only one he ever made.

We don’t feel a single hundred should render you ineligible as a number eight, which means Vaas was a better number eight than Warne.

Ravindra Jadeja

Jadeja averages 33.92 at eight and hasn’t scored a hundred in that position. While his one Test hundred was scored at seven, he has also played a respectable number of innings at number nine.

What Jadeja lacks is a significant body of work. He has made only 882 runs in 31 innings.

We are branding Jadeja ‘one to watch’.

Shaun Pollock

Pollock is a weird one. He averaged 30.96 in 79 innings at eight and never made a hundred there. You could argue that he fails the ‘multiple hundreds’ all-rounder test because he made two when batting in other spots, but he made them both at nine, so that seems unfair.

To be honest we’re just putting this one down to South Africa’s conservative selection policy in the Pollock era where they just used to clog the side with all-rounders because they were terrified of getting bowled out.

Conclusion

In many ways we think Chaminda Vaas fits what we’re looking for best of all, but we’re going to give it to Vettori.

Yes, he made a bunch of hundreds and probably deserved a place in the New Zealand side as a batsman towards the end of his career, but he never would have got into that position without first playing 80 Tests as a bowler.

Also, did you see Dan Vettori bat? Dan Vettori was a horrible batsman. Make no mistake, Dan Vettori was a number eight. Dan Vettori was the best number eight.

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< 1 minute read

The very great thing about Shane Warne having a book out (ghosted by Mark Nicholas, of all people) is that he appears here, there and everywhere and talks his nonsense and we all get to marvel at how swiftly the man can form opinions and stick to them.

Warne thinks England should make Jos Buttler Test captain. This is a very Warne-ish thing to think. Put the eye-catching player in charge.

Like most of Warne’s ideas, there’s something underpinning it but maybe not all that much.

Firstly, he knows Buttler from Rajasthan Royals. Warne pretty much always talks up people he personally knows, particularly if he’s met them fairly recently.

Secondly, he reckons England need to unshackle Joe Root.

“Maybe England could think about their best player having the shackles off, not having the responsibility of captaincy, and give it to someone like Jos Buttler,” he said.

There’s merit in this. Maybe Joe Root would bat better unshackled. But wouldn’t that transfer of power merely amount to the shackling of Buttler?

“Jos could play with his freedom and captain the side, and Joe could just concentrate on his cricket,” Warne reasoned.

Apparently Buttler is unaffected by shackles for reasons that aren’t exactly explained. We can only presume he is able to wriggle out of the captaincy shackles whenever he wants (and presumably wriggle back into them whenever England are fielding or it’s a press conference or whatever.)

2 minute read

Shane Warne’s got another book out – No Spin. In it, he’s taken the time to dig over old grievances with Steve Waugh.

The story is this. Steve Waugh wanted to drop Shane Warne once because he was coming back from major shoulder surgery and he wasn’t bowling very well. Warne agreed that he wasn’t bowling very well, but said he was about to start bowling very well any minute now, so Waugh shouldn’t drop him.

Waugh dropped him.

Let’s say that the two men got on a bit less well after that point.

A little further down the line, Waugh was advised by doctors to miss a Test after a horrific on-field collision with Jason Gillespie. Waugh didn’t want to miss the Test.

Fox Sports reports that in a tour management meeting, Warne told Waugh that he didn’t think much of his suggestion that he’d field in a helmet if he had to and said that he should sit out the Test.

Waugh refused to sit out the Test. Warne stood his ground, and…

“As the conversation went on I got more and more facetious about it. I’d even say I was being a dickhead and looking for a bit of revenge.”

So there you have it: proof, finally, that Shane Warne is self-aware.

This is actually a somewhat damning revelation when you think about some of the other stuff he’s got up to over the years. A complete lack of self-awareness seemed to explain a lot.

< 1 minute readWe’ve written about ‘aggressive cricket’ about a billion times, but that’s largely because – like a snipped clothing label that hasn’t quite been fully removed – it continues to irritate us.

Different people mean different things by ‘aggression’ and also confuse cricketing aggression with actual aggression. The latest to say something stupid on the matter is, unsurprisingly, Shane Warne.

“All this about aggressive play – aggressive play can also be about wearing down your opposition and letting the ball go well, to keep them out in the field for long periods of time.”

No it can’t.

What’s happened is that ‘aggressive cricket’ has widely come to be seen as the best way of approaching the sport and now no-one dares say otherwise. This means that on those occasions when playing aggressively isn’t the best approach, rather than acknowledging this, people instead redefine what ‘aggressive’ means.

Sports people are really, really bad at words. It never fails to surprise us how they don’t merely misuse words, but misuse them in such a way that they warp meaning and undermine the English language for other people as well.

Here’s what Warne should have said:

“All this about aggressive play – good play can be about wearing down your opposition and letting the ball go well, to keep them out in the field for long periods of time.”

< 1 minute readShane Warne left an important part of his brain somewhere on a cricket field in Hampshire. It’s the part that stops you doing things that your 11-year-old self would have thought a good idea.

Here he is describing a painting he had commissioned.

Here’s the painting itself.

We’d love to know what this programme was and what else was covered. We’d particularly like to hear Warne talk us through the rest of his painting.

During the last Test, there was an unsually laboured spell of commentary in which Warne revisted his ‘Sherminator’ nickname for Ian Bell while working alongside Ian Botham. “He’s not the Sherminator any more,” said Warne. “He’s Stifler” – intending this as some form of bizarre compliment.

It’s a strange sort of 45-year-old whose favourite film is American Pie. It’s stranger still for someone that age to see Steve Stifler – a character who at one point refers to himself as ‘The Stifmeister’ – as being the hero.

Botham dealt with the situation by completely ignoring Warne, despite being asked direct questions on the matter on at least three separate occasions.

Beefy has rarely if ever before seemed so professional behind a microphone.

Thanks to Russell Jackson for pointing this video out.