No fairytale finish for Warne

SYDNEY (AFP): Despite a career full of captivating drama on and off the pitch, legspin legend Shane Warne has been unable to script a fairytale finish in his final game of cricket, Australian media said Friday.

Warne, who helped revive the art of spin bowling, will retire after Friday’s Indian Premier League match between his Rajasthan Royals and the Mumbai Indians bringing to a close an extraordinary playing career spanning two decades.

But the maestro will end one of cricket’s most successful and controversial playing careers as a loser, with the Royals unable to make the IPL finals.

“So it’s the end for Warne – more than four years after quitting Test cricket and nearly four years since his last first-class outing,” the Australian Associated Press said.

“Aged 41, Warne completes a playing road with bumps, twists and turns beyond the imagination of the most fanciful Hollywood script writer. Or Hollywood starlet.”

Warne, who once described his life as a soap opera, retires as an undisputed genius of his sport, his influence on Australian cricket second only to Donald Bradman, AAP said.

“But he also farewells as among the most polarising of sportsmen. Some say the magnitude of his ‘cricket brain’ left little grey matter for other purposes. Think extra-marital affairs. Saucy text messages. Saucy baked beans. Diuretics. Crass celebrations. Sledging. Smoking. Warne was a gifted bowler, but also a wrong’un.”

Current Australian Test star Shane Watson, a Rajasthan Royals team-mate, believes Warne could still dominate world cricket if he wanted to.

“It has been hard for the guys coming in and trying to make their mark on international cricket with the Australian team. The way Warnie is bowling now, he would continue to dominate world cricket,” Watson told The Melbourne Age from Mumbai.

“It’s been mind-blowing for me to see him, after not bowling for a year, be all over batsmen the way he is. It’s pretty crazy how someone has got that much skill and hasn’t lost that control over something that is so difficult to do. If he ever came out of retirement, which he’s not going to do, he would still dominate.”

The Age said others believe Warne expresses his bowling genius less often than he used to, but in the last act of his career, in four seasons as captain and coach of Rajasthan, he has been a powerful promotional tool for the Indian Premier League, which features quickfire Twenty20 cricket.

The Australian said Warne had learnt an expensive cultural lesson in his latest and final clash with cricket authorities.

On Wednesday, Warne was fined $50,000 for his part in a row with the secretary of the Rajasthan Cricket Association, whom he berated in front of the television cameras over the choice of wicket at home for the team.

“In his most recent avatar, Shane Warne has played snake charmer to Indian cricket,” The Australian said.

“The master seducer and captain of the Rajasthan Royals has had the subcontinent eating from his hand for the past four IPL seasons in much the same way he had batsmen, an assortment of women and the cricket establishment eating from it in times further past.

“However, the leg-spinner has fallen foul of the serpentine power plays of Indian cricket just as he is about to bow out from it triumphant.”