Shane Warne was once the top spin bowler in the world. He wrecked havoc where ever he went. He was Australia's top spinner for fifteen years (1992 - 2007). However, it was in 1993 and the 'ball of the century' that really put him on he map.
The Ball of the Century, also referred to as the Gatting Ball or simply, That Ball, is a cricket delivery bowled by Australian spin bowler Shane Warne to English batter, Mike Gatting, on 4 June 1993; the second day of the first Test of the 1993 Ashes series, at Old Trafford in Manchester.
With his first ball against England, in his first Ashes Test, Warne produced a spectacular delivery that bowled Gatting out. It became recognised as being of significance not just in the context of the match but more generally in signalling a revival of leg spin bowling.
The year 1993 was one for shifts in the sporting landscape. Pete Sampras began an era of domination at Wimbledon which would see him go on to win seven men's singles crowns in eight years while Manchester United won the first of 13 Premier League titles under Sir Alex Ferguson.
There was, though, one more golden era that began in that summer, sandwiched between the successes of United and Sampras; just down the road from the footballing Old Trafford at the cricket ground of the same name.
Shane Warne's coronation as the king of spin bowling, was as swift as it was unexpected. Few outside Australia knew of the potential held by the bleach blond 23-year-old from Victoria.
The announcement of his coming lasted all of the seven seconds he took to prepare and deliver his first ball in a Test in England and his first in Ashes cricket; known now as the 'ball of the century'.
The pitch at Old Trafford traditionally favours spin bowling and England picked two spin bowlers: Phil Tufnell and debutant, Peter Such. In contrast, Australia picked three fast bowlers, with the inexperienced Warne as the only spinner. Warne had played in 11 Test matches up to that point and taken 31 wickets at a moderate average of 30.80.
Although showing some promise, Warne's early career had been less than spectacular and his style of bowling—leg spin—was seen by many cricket followers as an antiquated art with little value in the modern game. Fast bowling had dominated the game since the legendary West Indian pace bowlers of the 1950s through to the 1980s.
New Zealand's captain and leading batsman, Martin Crowe, had praised Warne before the series but Wisden notes that Crowe's proclamation was widely dismissed as excusing New Zealand's frailties rather than genuinely endorsing Warne.
English captain, Graham Gooch, won the toss and elected to bowl first, hoping to use the pitch conditions to make batting difficult for the Australians. Despite Mark Taylor scoring a century, Australia was dismissed for a moderate total of 289 runs. England also began well, reaching 71 runs before Mike Atherton was dismissed by Merv Hughes.
Opposite Gooch, Mike Gatting was the next man to bat and he duly set about scoring runs. At this point, Australian captain Allan Border turned to his leg spinner, Shane Warne. However, Gatting was renowned as a world-class player against spin bowling and was fully expected to give the inexperienced Warne a tough time.
The reign that began with the drifting, turning, spitting leg-break that pitched in the rough outside Mike Gatting's leg stump and clipped the off bail
"It's very seldom that you see the course of history altered by the trajectory of a single delivery," the award-winning Australian cricket writer, Gideon Haigh, external told BBC Sport. "That certainly happened with that ball."
After a slow run-up of just a few paces, Warne rolled his right arm over and delivered a leg break to the right-handed Gatting. The ball initially travelled straight down the pitch toward the batsman. As is apparent from slow-motion replays, the rapidly spinning cricket ball began to drift to the right (due to the Magnus effect). The ball ended up pitching several inches outside the line of Gatting's leg stump.
Gatting responded by thrusting his left leg forward towards the pitch of the ball, and pushing his bat next to his pad, angled downwards. This was a standard defensive tactic used by most experienced batsmen against leg-spin balls that were pitched outside the leg stump. The intention is for the ball to hit either the pad or the bat without danger of being out.
It's because the ball is pitched outside the leg stump, the batsman can't be out leg before wicket (LBW) and if the ball spun slightly more than expected; it would hit the bat and rebound safely down to the ground so the batsman cannot be caught.
However, the ball landed in a patch of the pitch which had been worn by the follow-through of pace bowlers earlier in the game (footmarks). This increased the friction between the ball and the surface, causing it to turn far more than Gatting (or anyone else) expected. The ball passed the outside edge of his bat, then clipped the top of his off stump, dislodging the bails.
Gatting stared at the pitch for several seconds, before accepting that he was out bowled and walked off the field. The dismissal was captured in a photograph by Steve Lindsell, in which Gatting is in shock, while wicketkeeper Ian Healy raises his arms in celebration behind and Gatting's off bail spins somewhere above his head
Warne arrived in England with 11 Tests and 31 wickets to his name. In that first Test, which Australia would go on to win by 179 runs,, external he was selected on an Old Trafford pitch that was offering enough assistance to spinners for England to include Phil Tufnell and Peter Such
Shortly before lunch on day two, Gatting came to the wicket at number three and, soon after, faced Warne's first delivery.
With the walk to the crease that would become so familiar over the next 20 years, Warne, wrist cocked, fizzed a leg-break he would later admit he was simply trying to turn as much as possible into the debris just ahead of Gatting's front foot.
Having enough revolutions to drift across Gatting's eyeline, the ball landed far outside the leg stump, spun sharply across the batsman's grope forward and took the top of the off pole, about 18 inches from where it had pitched.
"It came down in a great area for him and it did spin an awfully long way from two or three inches outside leg stump," said Gatting, a skilful and aggressive player of spin in his 79 Tests for England.
"I stood there because I didn't hear the death rattle, then looked around and thought 'blimey, there's a bail on the floor'."
"My foot was in, so I knew I could not have been stumped. The ball had not brushed my bat, my glove or pad, so I thought Australia wicketkeeper Ian Healy must have kicked the bail off. It wasn't to be. The ball had clipped the bail and I had to go."
In one delivery, Warne not only changed a Test format that had been dominated by pace bowling for the previous 20 years but also foreshadowed the Ashes misery that England would suffer for the rest of his career.
Beginning with the 34 wickets he took in the 4-1 series win of 1993, Warne would go on to amass 195 England victims.
Australia would lose only one of the eight Ashes series in which Warne played and even then, in 2005, his 40 wickets almost single-handedly kept the urn in Baggy Green hands.
"Certainly by the end of the series we felt that there might be something more to this fella than we were led to believe," added former England captain Gatting.
"The amazing thing was his consistency, where he pitched the ball, the lengths he bowled and the pace he put on the ball. That one delivery defined the start of his career, not his entire career. He bowled many fine spells and won many cricket matches with his wonderful bowling."
Wonderful bowling may not quite do Warne justice. A simple search on YouTube, jogs the memory to deliveries that made a red leather ball perform tricks that almost defy science.
Huge turning leg-breaks to Englishmen, Marcus Trescothick, Andrew Strauss and West Indian, Shivnarine Chanderpaul. The skidding flipper that fooled Alec Stewart. Countless batsmen bowled around their legs.
"We all recall those amazing Warne deliveries that spun a long way," continued Haigh, author of On Warne, winner of the Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year award for 2013:
"Warne made us want to look at things again and again and again in order to confirm the reality that we'd just seen. He made us doubt the evidence of our own eyes and that is a very rare sportsman indeed."
However, it was that first delivery to Gatting in 1993 that almost became Warne's career in microcosm, a perfect summation of the manner in which he went about tormenting batsmen until he retired from Test cricket in 2007.
Haigh added: "What's telling about that ball is that he tried, with his very first ball in England, to simply spin it as hard as he could. That was a summation of his whole approach to cricket.
"He didn't bowl a flat ball into the rough and try for a dot. He tried to get a wicket and that's what he did for his whole career. He never gave a batsman a moment's rest."
The fall of Gatting's wicket left England on 80 runs for 2 wickets, a position from which they never recovered, as Warne added the wicket of Robin Smith a mere four runs later. Warne also accounted for Gooch and Andy Caddick in the innings; helping reduce England to a first-innings total of just 210.
Encouraged by their bowling, Australia declared their second innings at 432 -5. Warne then contributed four more wickets as Australia won the match by 179 runs, winning the man of the match award for his efforts.
The result of this match set the tone for the remainder of the series and Australia cruised to a comfortable 4–1 victory; with Warne taking a total of 34 wickets at an average of 25.79 and being named the Australian man of the series (each team being awarded a separate Man of the Series award by the other in that series).
This series was another step in the early stages of Australia's long domination of world cricket, coinciding with Warne's exceedingly successful career. Warne's bowling also provided an eye-opening insight into the subtleties and power of leg spin bowling for modern cricket audiences; who had become used to the spectacle of pace attacks and marked a worldwide resurgence of popularity in the art of spin bowling in general, and leg spin in particular.
Warne's delivery to Gatting has become known as the Ball of the Century. Since that incident, Warne has come to be acknowledged as one of the best bowlers in history. During the penultimate Test match of his career on Boxing Day 2006, in the fourth Ashes Test against England, Warne took his 700th Test wicket, bowling Andrew Strauss to become the first cricketer ever to reach this milestone.
Graham Gooch commented on the reaction of Gatting, "He looked as though someone had just nicked his lunch", as Gatting was much mocked for his rotundity. This was further alluded to by journalist Martin Johnson, who said, "How anyone can spin a ball the width of Gatting boggles the mind" and again by Gooch who added, "If it had been a cheese roll, it would never have got past him."
It was said that Gatting visited Warne in the Australian Dressing Rooms at Old Trafford and asked: "Bloody hell, Warnie, what happened?" to which Warne replied, "Sorry, mate; just got lucky."
Gatting later remarked that he was happy to be part of a great moment in cricket history. Gooch was equally bemused: "That delivery would've got anyone out; it was the perfect length and speed. The perfect ball."
During the Old Trafford Test of the 2005 Ashes series, the long-retired Gatting re-created the Ball of the Century with an automated bowling machine programmed to deliver leg spin.
The delivery was the subject of the song "Jiggery Pokery" on The Duckworth Lewis Method's eponymous cricket-themed album.
During the ICC Cricket World Cup, India unorthodox bowler Kuldeep Yadav's dismissal of Pakistan's Babar Azam in 2019 and of England's Jos Buttler in 2023 drew comparisons to Warne's ball, with James Gheerbrant of The Times calling the delivery "[Kuldeep's] own 'ball of the century'."
Similarly in 2018, England leg spinner, Adil Rashid, bowled Virat Kohli (in the final ODI at Headingley) and KL Rahul (in the final Test at The Oval) with the Ball of the Century. In the final ODI of the 2021 Pakistan Tour of England, Matt Parkinson bowled Imam-ul-Haq, placing the ball in the rough and generating a large amount of turn. The ball was stated to be the 'biggest spinning ball in the history of ODI cricket', as the ball spun 12.1 degrees.
In the second Women's Twenty20 match of the Indian women's tour of Australia 2021, Shikha Pandey bowled a ball that has been described as 'Ball of the Century', to get rid of Alyssa Healy.
It's amazing how one moment can change the tide. It can set a precedent for future players of the game. Unfortunately, Shane Warne has passed away. He will always be missed and remembered.
Something like this this can't be ignored and forgotten about. Somehow and some way, this will always be brought up.