Shane Warne‘s leg-spinner to remove Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993 may have been the Ball of the Century, but it was a dismissal six months earlier that marked the Victorian as a player to watch.
It was Warne’s first Boxing Day Test, and his first match for Australia at his beloved MCG.
With West Indies 1-143 on the final day of the second Test in 1992-93, the match seemed headed for a draw, before Warne produced one of the most famous balls he bowled on Australian soil, although there’s no shortage of competition for that honour.
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Richardson played back to a short-pitched ball, and was completely deceived as the ball hurried through and crashed into off-stump.
“I knocked them over with my flipper – the one to Richie Richardson was about the best I ever bowled,” Warne wrote in his autobiography, No Spin.
“Everything clicked, it felt like magic.”
At the start of that day, Warne’s Test career record was an unflattering five wickets at 90.20, but he finished with 7-52, as the West Indies lost 9-76 to crash to defeat by 139 runs.
As Warne wrote in his book, the day ended with what is now an eerie co-incidence, when former Australian wicket-keeper Rod Marsh rang to congratulate the 23-year-old.
Warne had presented Marsh and Terry Jenner with a bottle of red wine to thank them for their help the previous winter when he’d been preparing for a tour of Sri Lanka, and they’d both promised to open the wine at an appropriate time.
Tragically, Warne and Marsh both died on the same day nearly 30 years later.
“Rod rang the MCG dressing room after that victory and said he was at home drinking the red I’d given him,” Warne wrote.
“It was wonderful of him to call.”
Australia’s 12th man for that match, Greg Matthews, went and found Warne’s father, Keith, and brought him to the Australian dressing room to celebrate Warne’s career-turning haul.
“I thought it was important for his father to be part of it, and to share the moment with his son and enjoy it,” Matthews told Wide World of Sports.
“Those kind of moments are so rare, people didn’t tend to get into the dressing room so much in those days, but I thought it had to be done.
“I went and grabbed him and said, ‘Come and have a beer with your boy’.”
Mark Taylor was standing at first slip when Warne dismissed Richardson, and told Wide World of Sports that the dismissal was probably the first time the Australian public had seen something special from the leg-spinner.
“That’s a fair call,” Taylor told Wide World of Sports.
“A few of us had been to Zimbabwe a year earlier, and Warnie’s flipper, when we first saw it, was just awesome.
“It actually swung back into the right handers. You’d see it short out of the hand and think it was going to be a long hop.
“It certainly confused and deceived Richie, if you look at his reaction he’s thinking, ‘What was that?'”
Taylor noted that the Warne flipper of the early 1990s was deadly for those players who hadn’t faced him previously.
“It was pickable for sure, but then again I saw a lot of it. But those who hadn’t seen him before had no idea,” he explained.
“It was a lethal delivery, and I don’t think world cricket had seen a flipper like that for years. Trevor Hohns bowled one, but I don’t think he’ll mind me saying that it wasn’t as lethal as Warnie’s.”
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