Shane Warne set the bar so high for leg-spinners that it has become almost impossible to follow in his footsteps, according to former England batter Mark Butcher.
Since Warne retired in 2007, only one specialist leg-spinner has debuted for Australia in Test cricket. That was Bryce McGain, who played a single match in 2009 and went wicketless.
Worldwide, Pakistan’s Yasir Shah is the only wrist spinner to have taken 150 Test wickets since Warne bowed out of the game.
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Butcher can speak from experience, having played a famous innings of 173 not out to lead England to victory against Australia at Headingley in 2001, on a day five pitch that would typically have favoured Warne.
“It interests me quite a lot because presumably we were going to get a whole generation of Australian, English, Pakistani and Indian leg-spinners coming out and overtaking the world game,” he said on BT Sport, when speaking of Warne’s legacy.
“That’s kind of happened in T20 cricket, where that style of bowling is very dangerous indeed, but I wonder if Shane Warne being so brilliant at the most difficult art there is, has actually made it more difficult.
“Everyone has to live up to the standard of accuracy, hard spin, reading the game as well as he did, and nobody has been able to live up to that, nobody, even the most talented guys.
“In a funny way it’s a double-edged sword, it made it incredibly popular, people wanted to do it, but then people found out how difficult it was.”
The burden of following in Warne’s footsteps is starkly exposed by a look at the Australian bowling statistics since he retired.
Only three spinners, Nathan Lyon, Nathan Haurtiz and Steve O’Keefe have take more than 30 Test wickets, and all are finger spinners.
Australia’s most successful wrist spinner in the Post-Warne era is none other than Steve Smith, with 18 wickets at 55.
Stuart MacGill had been expected to finally earn an extended run in the side when Warne retired, but he was forced to give up the game himself in 2008 due to injury, while Mitchell Swepson has been on the verge of a debut for some time without yet getting a baggy green.
Adam Zampa has enjoyed white-ball success in recent years, but with a first class bowling average of 48 we’re not likely to see him in the Test arena. Likewise, Cameron Boyce and James Muirhead both played for Australia in short-form cricket without ever threatening to grab a spot in the Test team.
Butcher noted the difficulty of coming into Test cricket as a spinner and being able to impose yourself on the game in the way Warne did.
“That’s another quality of his, in the end he took ownership of that,” he explained.
“It takes you to be that sort of personality, and to be that good, to say this is what I need to get myself into a spell, I want this field, and then he calls all the shots himself.
“There are very few spinners that have that force of personality and belief in themselves to be able to do that, to control things to that extent.”
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