‘What would Warnie do?’ Joe Root, a bottle of tequila, and the night Warne took his last wicket

3 months ago 6

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It’s been referred to as Shane Warne’s last ever wicket.

Bowling an orange, with Joe Root umpiring and Darren Gough fielding, Warne fizzed one past the tequila bottle brandished by Michael Vaughan one night, while the four men were taking part in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in late 2021.

The bonhomie of the moment was captured on video, but away from those japes Warne, Root, Vaughan and Gough talked cricket for hours – to the point that Root asked Warne if he would help coach England in Australia that Ashes summer.

Gough has asserted the truth of the story, and Root told this masthead that it was probably right.

“I probably tried,” Root says. “We did have quite a few drinks throughout that week so I can’t remember that specific conversation. I don’t think I’m too much of an ego-driven person, and when you’ve got the opportunity to sit down and talk cricket with someone like Shane Warne you don’t pass up on that opportunity.

“We were in a completely different environment, we were away from cricket. We were brought together through golf in a strange sort of way, but he was just brilliant in terms of giving me what his thoughts on the game were, and just trying to offer some support and some guidance, which from an ex-player especially from Australia, you don’t get too much.”

Vaughan’s recollections are also a little hazy, perhaps due to the aforementioned tequila bottle. But he gets at a fundamental truth of the week playing golf: Root was trying to figure out a way to improve England’s then moribund Test team, and Warne’s approach to cricket and life appealed.

“We talked a huge amount about cricket,” Fox Cricket commentator Vaughan says. “England were struggling and not quite in the groove as a red-ball team.

“Joe was trying to find a bit of a mechanism to get the Test team going. Warnie was great because whoever wanted to talk cricket, whatever the country, he would talk cricket to you and always be dead honest and upfront and give his opinion.”

Warne’s opinions, as it happens, had formed the philosophy by which another commentator, Rob Key, had chosen to live by. The pair were opponents at both cricket and poker, during which time Warne’s sheer positivity and relish for “making a game of it” steered Key away from the more conservative tendencies of county pros.

Warne and Key watched in 2021-22 as England were smashed. Root kept Warne’s thoughts in his head throughout, and was also grateful for how, having gotten to know him, the older man did what he could to make England’s tour more enjoyable amid the strictures of biosecurity.

One favour was to get members of the touring squad onto the exclusive Capital golf course on Melbourne’s sandbelt, and he was constantly checking in with Root. Before the Boxing Day Test, Warne even penned a column that staunchly defended England and their captain. So staunchly, in fact, that one commenter asked: “Since when did Warnie work for the ECB?”

Given how things subsequently moved, it is possible to imagine Warne having a big role, even unofficially, in what came next for England’s Test team. Key was hired as the new high-performance chief for English cricket in April 2022, some six weeks after Warne’s death. He soon appointed Ben Stokes as England captain and Brendon McCullum as coach.

“I think English culture, English sport and English cricket in particular has been far too reserved, far too conservative,” Key told the For The Love of Cricket podcast recently. “I’m talking about the mentality. There’s a lack of optimism at times with England cricket. We’re very good at pointing out all the problems and not the solutions.

Ben Stokes (right) with director of cricket Rob Key.

“My biggest belief is that your brain works better if you’re thinking positively. So I wanted people that could come in, and I wanted a coach that was going to free people up, let them take the aggressive option, let them go out there and see the opportunity.

“[Warne] captained a lot like Stokes, and he made you feel like blokes were bowling hand grenades. When he let go of the ball, this thing came out fizzing, and if you played the best forward defence, he made you feel like you’d played the worst shot ever.”

England’s new approach became known as “Bazball”, but McCullum has credited Warne more than once.

“Sometimes in the job that we’re in with England at the moment, and the way we’re trying to play, it’s everything that Shane Warne would have wanted the game to have been,” he has said.

“Sometimes we’re midway through a game, we don’t know whether to stick or twist, and you know you’ve got messages to deliver to the team. I often think, what would Warnie do?”

Equally, England’s players have come to think of things also in terms of what Warne would not do. Chief among those was watching Australia post deep fielders from the first ball of the 2023 Ashes series. The past couple of years have seen something of a change-up – an England team playing as though it wants to be a certain Australian side.

“The way Shane looked at the game is very similar to the way this side wants to play, and probably the side he played in as well,” Root says. “Guys like Matthew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne himself, Brett Lee, they were all very aggressive players, they all liked to move the game forward and all wanted to make things happen.

“When you spoke about the game with him, you could see him getting that across. That’s exactly how I like to see the game as well and always have done, but sometimes it’s not always possible with the resources you might have, or the [style] that is going to get the best out of the players that are there.

“I think with this group of players and the team we currently play in, that’s the method which is going to bring our best game to the fore more often than not. It aligns well with the way that Shane looked at the game.”

It aligns well with how Warne looked at the game, and to an extent with his results as a skipper. It’s occasionally forgotten that as captain of Victoria, Hampshire or occasionally Australia’s white-ball team, Warne lost almost as often as he won.

His gambler’s instinct was rewarded sometimes, but not all. Certainly, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting, to name two of his national team captains, often thought Warne was too open to taking risks.

But as a senior player with Australia and the best leg spinner the game has seen, Warne’s sharp thinking outfoxed more than enough opponents to convince them of his cricketing wisdom.

“They certainly play in a way that Warnie would enjoy,” says Vaughan. “But he’d want them to win. He wanted players to get on the front foot and play a certain way, he wanted bowlers to think about getting wickets, he wanted captain to set fields to get wickets. But at the end of whatever the game was it was about winning.

“He really enjoyed sports teams that had a method but were really smart. He loved smart players. Same on the golf course, loved smart golfers who knew how to get out of a hole. If you can’t birdie a hole, make sure you get out with a par. Or he’d look at a pro and think if they’re having a bad day, how do they make sure it’s a level par day.

“He’d be saying to this England side, ‘Go out there and have a crack, but geez you’ve got to win’. You’ve got to have that moment now of winning a big series, a five-match series, something they’ve not done since 2017. He’d be saying, ‘I love the mindset, you’ve been tremendous, but now it’s about getting to the next stage’. Over a five-match series you can’t always play your natural way.”

Perhaps the best evidence for Bazball’s origins comes from the view of Ian Chappell, the straight-shooting former Australian captain who was Warne’s mentor. He is a strong advocate for Stokes.

“The rubbish that is spoken about Bazball is total rubbish because Stokes is doing what you should do, what England should have been doing a lot of the time,” Chappell told Wide World of Sports this week.

“If you boil Test cricket down and simplify it, the batsmen’s job is to score the runs as quickly as possible because the hardest thing to do in the game is to get 20 wickets. The other thing Stokes is doing is trying to beat the opposition from ball number one, which is how you should play cricket.

“If you’re trying to win from ball number one, you’re sending a message to your own team that gets the good players going, and you’re also sending a message to the opposition: mate there’s no draw here, this is a win or a loss. There’s a lot of captains who panic a bit when they realise there’s no draw here.”

What, by the way, did Warne exhort Root’s men to do on the last Ashes tour here?

He called for England to get a lot more aggressive in tactics, body language and attitude to the game. See off the new ball then go on the offensive against the quicks; attack Nathan Lyon, don’t allow him to settle. Above all else, be brave.

“I don’t think it would ever have worked out,” Root concludes of his coaching offer. “I don’t think he would ever have been allowed back in Australia if he did that. But it was just the fact that he was willing to give up time that he did to help me personally. I’ll be forever grateful for that.”