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connect me and the great Shane Warne: Accrington Cricket Club and Sky Sports. Few people will know that Warne played as a professional at my club during the 1990s, shortly before he made his international début for Australia. Our paths did not cross back then, as I had packed up playing at the weekend and was progressing my coaching career. But all the reports I heard around the town were that Warne was the life and soul of every party going. He used to fall off his stool at the end of a night. It was the sign that everyone had had a good one. If he didn’t, people would worry something was up. He has always been Jack the lad, of course, and part of his vast appeal is that he is a guy who knows how to have fun. If there isn’t any around, he goes elsewhere to find it.

      There are simply not enough hours in the day for Warney; he is a real larger-than-life character. In one respect he is very similar to Beefy, always planning what he wants to do next. ‘What we doing tonight? Tomorrow? Next week?’ He has a busy social diary all right, but whereas others are connoisseurs of wine or beer, he is an aficionado of fast food. Yep, one in a million is Warne when it comes to this. Everything has to be just so: chips not only have to be hot but served at exactly the right temperature. He looks at chips as others would look at a glass of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon after swilling it around their palate. With pizza, he is looking for a specific consistency and depth of base. He looks at it with an expert eye and talks you through its success or failure. Oh, and he doesn’t eat anything other than chips and pizza, as far as I can tell. He also smokes fags like world supplies of tobacco are about to run out, and as we usually operate at strictly non-smoking media centres these days, he will forever be dropping notes into security guards’ top pockets, so he can go and have a puff out the back.

      Shane is a real character and slipped seamlessly into our commentary team during the 2009 Ashes, just as I knew he would. He made a great start to his broadcasting career with Sky – he just looks the part for a start. As he ought to, given the outrageous amount of work he has had done. He’s got new teeth, new hair, and goodness knows what else. With all the showbiz glamour of a man nicknamed Hollywood, however, come impeccable manners and a fantastic attitude towards the sport.

      Australia will always be up there, they will always be competitive, but you just don’t replace Warne, and my favourite moment of the Noughties was when he left the field at the SCG, the scene of his international début, for the final time. I sneaked out on to the field, camera in hand, and got a wonderful picture of Warne and Glenn McGrath walking off. He was just holding the ball to the adoring crowd. It is a picture I treasure and one I keep on my computer.

      That picture to me symbolises what a profound effect he had on the game. You will never see the like of him again in terms of his character and ability. He was a complete and utter one-off. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what made him so good. People might say it came so easily that he did not understand, or appreciate, what he had got. But I think he did. He was such a confident lad. The only thing which suggests he ever worried – and it’s so well documented that I am definitely not telling tales out of school – was the fact that he was such a chain-smoker. Yet, if he ever lived on his nerves, there was no sense of it in his career performances.

      To him the art of leg-spin came so ridiculously naturally that he makes a mockery of his competition. When, during his initial summer with Sky in 2009, he did a spin-bowling demonstration at a break in the Oval Test, he did so after borrowing a pair of shorts and shoes off Michael Clarke. He must have had five fags before he went out into the middle, chain-smoking one after another. ‘I ’ope it goes OK. I don’t want to mess up,’ he said. He hadn’t bowled anywhere since last Pancake Tuesday at the IPL, and he was accompanied for the feature by two of our young English leg-spinners, Will Beer, of Sussex, and Somerset’s Max Waller, their limbs loose towards the end of their seasons.

      When Warne chats away as he does, the camera is his own; he has as much presence as a commentator as he did as an international performer. He knows when to look and when to look away, when to make his point and when to keep quiet. And just as in the middle, he knows how to milk the big moments, with that inherent sense of timing. This particular afternoon Nasser, who was hosting the live feature, threw him the ball in real Nasser style, as if throwing down the gauntlet to an old nemesis for the final time. ‘C’mon then, show us one,’ he said, abruptly, not long after he had warned the TV audience that this Aussie, fast approaching 40, had not bowled for months on end.

      Well, blow me if Warne didn’t rip this flippin’ leg-spinner three foot. With no warm-up, no practice deliveries, his very first ball produced that trademark fizzing sound through the air.

      ‘Ah, pretty good that,’ Warne said. ‘I don’t think I’ll bother with another.’

      The jaws on these two young kids just dropped. They are two nice young leg-spinners, who can both give the ball a pleasant little spin, but Warney absolutely tore his one ball. That was enough to confirm to anyone what we already knew – he’s a flaming genius.

      His presence is enough to inspire a team, and I remember the way Australia reacted to his return in the 1998–9 Ashes. We had just won at Melbourne, bowling the Aussies out in what you might call English conditions, to reduce the score to 2–1, with one Test to play. But who was back for that final Test in Sydney? And they made damned sure there would be nothing in the pitch for the seamers, as they prepared what could best be described as a dustbowl for Warne, Stuart MacGill and Colin Miller, who opened the bowling with off-cutters and then switched to spin later in the innings, to operate on. In those conditions the returning superstar might have run amok, but his presence only served to inspire MacGill, who had been phenomenal in that series, even further. He took a dozen wickets to Warne’s two as we lost by 98 runs. Imagine how good a career MacGill would have had without the greatest-ever exponent of the art of leg-spin pissing on his chips.

      As a character, as a mate and as a performer, Warne is absolutely top of the tree. When he waltzed into our box at Sky for the second Ashes Test of 2009 it was obvious that he had done things in television before. And it also helped that he is a complete natural. Regularly people will ask me, ‘What’s the best advice you’ve ever had?’ They are normally talking about cricket and are expecting a reply like ‘Keep your elbow high and play with the full face.’ But I sidestep the technical stuff and tell them that the best thing to do is what comes naturally. To me, that is what Warne does. He is just so comfortable on screen, and what you see is what you get.

      Certainly, Warney being himself helped me click with him on air, and it wasn’t long before I got him going. We were chatting away about what we had been up to between Test matches, and Shane was recalling a memorable few days up at Archerfield in Scotland, playing golf with Beefy. ‘Oh mate,’ he said, and proceeded to ramble about doing this, doing that, having clearly had a spanking good time. Knowing he was a lad of great manners, however, I just knew he would come back with ‘What you been up to?’ Right on cue, he did so.

      ‘Actually, I’ve been to LA,’ I replied.

      ‘Oh, that’s great, mate, yeah, I like LA. Love it, in fact.’

      ‘Do you? Have you been to Lower Accrington? Oh, of course you have.’

      ‘Pardon?’

      The following week, I told him, attempting to put a serious spin on things, that I was off to the USA. ‘Whereabouts?’ he asked.

      ‘The Uther Side of Accrington.’

      We were having a ball, bouncing off each other, and getting paid for it. But he was certainly becoming wary of my humour, so I waited for the next Test match before I snared him again.

      ‘Been anywhere nice, Shane?’ I said.

      ‘You’re not getting me with that one again, Bumble,’ came back the reply.

      ‘C’mon, where’ve you been?’

      He relented and started telling me how he’d done this and done that.

      ‘Great,’ I said, adding a hurried, muffled ‘Well I’ve been to T-o-u-r-k-e-e.’

      ‘What?’ he said, giving a quick glance at my lack of tan. ‘You’ve been to Turkey?’

      ‘No. Torquay,’

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