Shane Warne wanted to make every single ball an event. He would stand at the top of his mark, letting the clock tick and the batsman sweat. Those 22 yards were his domain, none more so than that of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, his home ground and host to a funeral that surely could have waited.
It was a star-studded if somewhat incongruous affair. The last time I saw Elton John perform at a memorial service, Princess Diana was being laid to rest. The music at the MCG was less “I vow to thee, my country” and more Eighties classics, but then again, the G is to Australian Cricket what Westminster Abbey is to the Anglican Church.
For days, I felt a sense of guilt at my reaction to Warne’s death. On March 4, newspapers from around the world carried the image of a father weeping over the lifeless frame of his teenage son, covered by a blood-stained sheet, on a hospital trolley in the besieged city of Mariupol. And there I was, upset about a cricketer.
I texted a friend seeking absolution and he was good enough to explain: “Formative memories of the sport we love, though.”
It is not so much that Warne transcended the sport, though he did. It is that he was one of those athletes — and one must use the term loosely with Warne – who, even if you didn’t understand the rules of cricket, you could tell he was doing something self-evidently absurd with the ball.
And he was so full of life. At 52 he had plans. Fifteen years after international retirement, his brain was still whirring with ideas as variable as a fifth-day pitch.
As time has passed, I think my feelings of guilt were more associated with what we, as fans, had gained at the expense of those closest to him, who needed him more. In a recent documentary, Warne talked of his regret at missing his three children growing up while he toured the world in pursuit of team victory and personal glory.
Indeed, one reason he gave for his retirement while still at the top of the game was to spend more time with his family. That has, tragically, been cut short. In Test cricket as in life, it is not always possible to make up time later in the day.
