It’s 20 years since the Gatting Ball, and sadly, Australian cricket dominance can be plotted like a sine curve. In case watching Old Trafford in real time becomes too demoralising, here is a mood lifter that’s just a mouse click away.

 

I wrote this reminiscence for Hardie Grant’s ‘Australia: Story of a Cricket Country’ (ed Christian Ryan) http://tonywilson.com.au/writing/five-greatest-australian-cricketers-no-2-shane-warne.

 

‘It is possible to get lost in the hype around the Gatting Ball. As I searched YouTube for a refresher, I wondered whether it had pitched on or about the popping crease, breaking nearly square behind Mike Gatting’s legs. Then I found it—and it is actually more beautiful for the fact that it didn’t do any of that. It’s a conventional leg-spinner, drifting away and then tearing back across the batsman to clip the top of off stump, Warne’s stock-in-trade for fourteen seasons, although delivered with the effortless pivot and snap that typified the years before his shoulder started to degrade.

What stamped it as perfect theatre was Gatting’s reaction—‘it was as though someone had just nicked his lunch,’ joked Graham Gooch of his rotund batting partner. Gatting was entitled to feel cheated. The ball started wide of leg and wobbled further away: what physicists term the Magnus effect, and what cricketers call ‘giving it a rip’. To a delivery pitched that wide, any decent player of spin, which Gatting was, would be looking to tuck bat behind pad and kick the ball away. But the turn was too severe, too fast. The forgotten aspect of the Ball of the Century, and the true augury of the champion career to come, is that Warne bowled a carbon copy in his second over. This time Robin Smith did well to get an edge. Two wickets in eight turbocharged balls. ‘He came off those Ashes,’ Fleming remembers, ‘and it was fair dinkum like Merv Hughes or Dennis Lillee bowling leg-spin. It was as if he’d always wanted this attention; and now, with the spotlight on him, he thrived.’’