The Cult: Shane Warne

The Cult acknowledges the brilliant and complex athletes who have left a unique mark on our lives, from perennial underachievers to trophy-laden champions. Inductee number four is a cricketer who looked like a beach bum, but bowled like a god.

The Cult is partly a cult of youth, so perhaps it's no surprise that on the 'Celebrity Testimony' section of the Advanced Hair Studio website, every single one is a sportsman. From Shane Warne at the top, through Austin Healey and Graham 'when I saw how good Greg Matthews looked with his new 'head of hair'' Gooch, all the way to Rafael Cretaro, 'Irish Soccer Star' at the bottom.

You wonder how it is for Shane now, all shiny and primped, when he hangs with the no-nonsense chunks of granite of yore. Guys like Steve Waugh, who'd know botox treatment as something you'd use to freshen up a particularly beloved pair of gloves. Here's what I reckon, outside of the jokey-jokey tone the internet compels me to write in: I bet they couldn't give a toss. They might offer the odd 'lookin a bit bloody strange here Warney', but if that's the afterlife of a teammate who perhaps more than anyone gave Australia the strict air of always being better, then so be it.

Shane Warne looked at the time like he should be a colourful, untrustworthy addition to the team. He is a beautiful reminder of what sport at its best allows: space for whatever shape or size fits. You could stand Leo Messi on top of Sachin Tendulkar and still barely reach Jan Koller's eyeline. It matters not.

I think it's wise to always give some space to the best possible outcome, that all the botox stuff might have been a variation on the flipper. Recognising that the wicket, as it were, of Elizabeth Hurley couldn't be breached by conventional leg breaks, Warne went bam – disguised straight delivery! And before she knew it, you'd like to imagine that Warney was in her manicured living-room dashing palm to fist and yelling 'you little ripper' at some Aussie Rules he'd illegally hooked her satellite up to receive. Phil de Freitas, Darren Gough and Devon Malcolm, the participants in Warne's only Test hat-trick at the MCG in 1994, would doubtless all have told her what to expect; but the problem that they and she and pretty much every batsman for more than a decade experienced is that you could never tell if Warne was about to do what he was supposed to or not. He coasted in on uncertainty.

Shane Warne has some extremely cool stats. Possibly the coolest came on his Test debut for Australia in 1992, when he took one wicket for 228 runs in a series against India. A lot of people would have been swayed to thinking that this bloke was exactly as he looked: capable of taking the occasional fancy wicket, but generally there to have a laugh. He was dropped.

Recalled for the second test of the series against the West Indies, he then cleaned out seven wickets in the second innings. And the interesting thing is that pretty much all of them get out trying to smash him about;

here comes this ball, coasting down towards me.

I'd pay good money to see a video of the change in facial expressions of batsmen, throughout his career, as his deliveries got halfway down the crease; what had started to the right of your eyeline was somehow landing around your left foot and then snapping at you like a released cobra. They tried to smack him about because he looked like a beach-bum, not a cricketer, and were usually caught off mistimed shots.

And then with the first ball of his first Ashes series he produced what it's passed into trite-speak to describe as 'the greatest ever delivery'. Then he took the most wickets in the series for either side. Then he took the most wickets in history for a spinner in a calendar year. Then he took 10 wickets (12 in fact) in a match for the first time, against South Africa. Then he took his Ashes hat-trick. We're at 1994, by this point.

Batsmen began to gulp. What had begun as them being the proper cricketers, and him a silly approximation of one, had become them looking like the naïve, slightly desperate adherents to 'proper', while Shane Warne played the game he wanted. There are so many videos of wickets he took with the batsman taking a prim little step at a ball pitched crazily outside leg to simply pad it away, and then looking down almost affronted by what that ball had the capacity to do. This one, for example…

You'd like to imagine Warne wearing one of those MCC club ties as a headband, as he came in for another over of unreadable destruction.

I'd said for pretty much the entirety of my life that cricket was boring and slow, in the manner of a prepubescent silly-billy who assumes he has to be right about things he knows absolutely nothing about (a manner which, if you've got any bright ideas on how to rid yourself of, answers to my Twitter please).

Anyway, I was still there, waiting at 11am on a Thursday morning for the game to start. So this moment comes not from some rehashed YouTube thing but my actual experience of what the arrival of Warne to the bowling attack felt like. To someone who didn't know much about cricket, it was inevitable. They put all these fielders within inches of the bat, and poor Mark Butcher was left to try to figure out ways in which to prevent a ball he couldn't judge from hitting him in ways he wasn't expecting. That 'ohhh yes, Shane' perpetually rasping out of Adam Gilchrist, as Warne got ever closer; and then a few minutes before lunch Butcher found what would be a regulation forward-defence to every other bowler wasn't enough against Warne. The ball chipped fractionally up off his bat, rolled sideways off his pad, and Ponting caught it. England collapsed.

I think that's what they must miss the most, the zing of elite sport that leaves you clutching at hair transplants and ill-advised coaching roles to try to re-staple it to your person. You have to get that forward-defence absolutely right. Not a bit right, not basically right, but nerve-janglingly spot-on, otherwise you're effectively dead. Which, if you work in an office and all you really have to get right is nothing, pass me a biscuit, is why we turn sport into a cult.

It is utterly representative of how he approached the crease that when he commentates these days, Warne will flicker through about eight variations on a theme before deciding he likes this one the most and going at it hard.

@TobySprigings