Warne the master is forever the student

Australia's greatest leg-spinner nears 500 Test wickets swapping tips with rivals and admiring head-high bouncers

Aptly enough, the spin-meister has been doing a turn. I meet Shane Warne in the lobby of the Grosvenor House Hotel, on London's Park Lane, where he and his former Australian team-mate Merv Hughes have been relating anecdotes to corporate luncheon guests, doubtless for a fat fee.

Accordingly, Warne is suited and booted, wearing a tie, looking jolly smart and, if I may say so, rather un-Australian. When we get upstairs to his suite, however, he turns back into the boy from Ferntree Gully. Off comes the jacket, tie, shoes, socks, and he unbuttons the shirt almost to the belly button. "That's better, mate," he says.

Warne is in Britain for a few double-acts with Merv, and to promote the paperback of his autobiography, entitled simply My Autobiography.

He is also in talks with Hampshire about renewing his contract. "I enjoyed my Hampshire experience," he says. "I would love to do it again down the track. The standard [of county cricket] surprised me a bit, to be honest with you. I thought it would be a lot easier. Saying that, it's difficult to get up every day for a game of county cricket. In Victoria we play 10 first-class games a year, and 10 one-dayers. You guys play a minimum of 45 games a year. That's a little bit too much."

During his season with Hampshire, Warne took 70 championship wickets at a cost per wicket of 23.14 runs, and 38 one-day wickets at a remarkable 16.64.

His Test record for Australia stands at 450 wickets at 26.52, with 278 wickets at 25.67 in one-day internationals. Wisden declared him one of its five cricketers of the 20th century, along with Sir Donald Bradman, Sir Jack Hobbs, Sir Garfield Sobers and Sir Vivian Richards. He is, surely, the greatest leg-spinner cricket has ever known. Moreover, he has single-wristedly made leg-spinning not just fashionable again, but downright glamorous.

I produce a cricket ball from my briefcase – every briefcase should have one – and invite him to show me the various grips and techniques he employs.

"Two fingers down, two fingers up, the thumb just rests, doesn't do anything," he says. "This is the leg-break, the over-spinner, the wrong 'un, the flipper comes out underneath, the backspinner, the zooter, the slider. And there are two or three variations of each, big spinning ones, little spinning ones..."

Even with 450 Test wickets under his belt (which has been known to need loosening a notch or two, although today he is looking impressively svelte), he is still learning his trade, he adds. He enthusiastically swaps secrets with fellow-spinners.

"Mushtaq Ahmed wanted to know how I bowl my flipper, and he's got two wrong 'uns, I wanted to know how he bowls his other wrong 'un. Saqlain Mushtaq wanted to know how I bowl my flipper too, and he bowls one that goes the other way. He bowls it with an off-spinner's action, and it goes like a leg-break. I've been practising that one. But I haven't mastered either of them. Mushtaq's been bowling my flipper pretty well, though. He knocked over a few of our blokes in Australia. The boys weren't too happy."

What least impressed him about county cricket, says Warne, was the ignorance surrounding spin.

"The captains at certain counties just don't understand how to captain a spin bowler, how to set a field, when to bowl him. It's not about bowling him for an over before lunch because you're trying to get a wicket, and he ends up going for eight or 10 so you don't bowl him again.

"In Australia there are only six teams, and each state has a couple of spinners, so the captains know what to do. I've been lucky. The captains I've played under have been brilliant. Allan Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh were all originally from New South Wales, which is a spinning place. Mark Taylor was fantastic. He really understood it.

"And I might be biased, but for me the best sight in cricket is a batsman using his feet against a spinner, hitting him over the top, or missing him and getting stumped." A pause. "Saying that, I must admit I do like watching a good fast bowler trying to knock a bloke's head off."

I ask him to assess England's best spinners. "Ashley Giles has a nice loop," he says. "And Salisbury's got a good wrong 'un, but I don't like the line he bowls, too much outside off stump. I think Tufnell's a great bowler. Good drift, good shape, and the ball leaves his hand as good as anyone I've ever seen."

Unlike Tufnell, Warne is also a considerable batsman (he counts his dismissal for 99 in last December's third Test against New Zealand in Perth as his biggest disappointment in cricket), but being a spinner himself does not necessarily help him to bat against it.

"No, I understand what they're trying to do, but they get me out because I try to slog them. I like to try and use my feet and smash it over the fence, which is a good feeling because I know how much I hate it. Although with some, like Keith Arthurton of the West Indies, if they hit me for six I know I'll get them out, stumped or caught, next ball. With Arthurton it's happened four or five times."

The best batsman he has ever bowled to, his poor show at Lord's notwithstanding, is Sachin Tendulkar "by a mile", Warne says.

"He judges the length of a ball a lot faster than anyone else." Has he ever outwitted Tendulkar? "Twice. Once in Melbourne, when he thought I'd bowled a leg-break but it was a quick straight one, and he was given out lbw. And in the first Test in India I ever played, in 1998, I got him third ball, caught at slip.

"I thought: I'll throw them up, bowl two or three big turning leg-breaks real slow, and see what he wants to do. The first ball, smash, straight down the ground for four. The second ball, he blocked it. The third he went for again and nicked it." A broad grin. "He's made about 5,000 against us since then."

If Warne's Test debut in India is memorable for the wicket of Tendulkar, his debut Test in England will be recalled for decades to come, doubtless to the enduring discomfort of Mike Gatting, whose fate it is, despite scoring nearly 4,500 Test runs, to be remembered principally for two things: wagging his finger at umpire Shakoor Rana, and his startled look as Warne's first delivery in an Ashes series turned sharply from outside leg stump and removed his off-bail.

Surprisingly, it is not Warne's own favourite. He was happier with one that spun even further to bamboozle the West Indies' Shivnarine Chanderpaul, in Sydney, breaking a big partnership between him and Carl Hooper. "That one was good for me because I was just coming back from my first finger operation."

Between finger operations, and shoulder strains, and accepting a $5,000 "gift" from a man introduced to him in a Sri Lankan casino as John, who later asked for information in return, not to mention an unseemly phone sex story that broke while he was with Hampshire and led to him losing the Australian vice-captaincy, there have been as many troughs as peaks in Warne's career. We do not dwell on the "John" business, with which he deals with apparent candour in the book, but I do ask him what his emotions were on learning of the death of his friend, the disgraced former South African captain Hansie Cronje?

"I couldn't believe it," he says. "It was a real tragedy, and I was disappointed with sections of the media. The way they covered it I thought was pretty ordinary. Hansie did the wrong thing, but he paid his dues, he was a wonderful cricketer and a wonderful person to those who knew him closely."

Warne's disappointment with the media extends to his own press. "Certain people make me out to be an arrogant, big-headed pig, and it's frustrating, because I have no right of reply." He has, I venture, added a degree of fuel to the fire with some, shall we say, errant behaviour. "Oh yeah, course I have. But I think I'm a half-decent bloke. And 90 per cent of the public are fantastic to me. But sometimes you stand there for an hour signing autographs and the one person you miss is the one who writes the letter of complaint."

From where I'm sitting, it has to be said, he seems a thoroughly engaging fellow. The South African batsman Darryl Cullinan, though, is one who might disagree. So tormented has he been by Warne that he has reportedly sought therapy.

"Yeah, so the story goes," says Warne, po-faced. "His problem is that he tends to play the man, not the ball. He averages 45 in Test cricket, so he's a wonderful player. And he plays other spinners very well, but struggles against me, I don't know why." We both know that he's being a little disingenuous. Warne has never been reluctant to add sledging to his armoury, and makes no apology for it. "If you can put a batsman off by saying something to him, then he's got a problem," he says.

"With Nasser Hussain in the early days, the tactic was to put him off his game, so I sledged him, and he sledged me back, and I'd end up getting him out, stumped. When a new bloke comes in you try to make him feel the way you did when you played your first Test. It's part of the game. When I first started, a lot more was said on the field than now.

"Saying that, it used to be that whatever happened on the field stayed there, and you'd have a beer with the opposition afterwards. Now you don't get to know the opposition as well because there are other things to do: warm-downs, stretching sessions, meetings, debriefs. The camaraderie is not what it used to be, which is a shame, because I used to learn a lot. I remember grabbing a six-pack after my first Test, and sitting next to Kapil Dev listening to him and Merv chat. That was fantastic."

If he could restore the camaraderie, how else would he improve the game? "I think you should be able to bowl as many bouncers as you like, in both forms of the game. And it shouldn't be called a wide if a spinner goes round the wicket and pitches outside leg-stump.That's just silly. It takes skill to bowl someone round their legs, it's something I've practised again and again, but if I bowl one or two wides, I'm not going to try it again.

"Other than that, I think cricket is a fantastic and wonderful game. No other game in the world can test your character, physically and mentally, over five days. And the five-day game is where it's at, which is not to say I don't like the one-day game. It's helped Test cricket, because there are hardly any draws anymore. Test matches are full of positive, aggressive cricket, and we've got Mr Packer to thank for that. Without him, who knows what cricket would have been?"

Without Warne, too, cricket would be a darn sight poorer. How much longer does he intend to play? "I'm 33 in September, so I've got a couple of years left yet," he says. Ample time for 500 Test wickets, then? "Maybe, mate," he says, with a grin. "Maybe."

Shane Warne: The life and times

Name: Shane Keith Warne.

Born: 13 September 1969, Ferntree Gully, Victoria.

Height: 6ft 0in.

Nicknames: Hollywood, Warnie.

Wickets: Test matches: 450 at 26.52 One day internationals: 278 at 25.67

Major teams: Australia, Victoria, Hampshire.

Playing career: Having made his first-class debut for Victoria in 1990, Warne was thrust on to the Test scene a year later in the third Test against India. In 1992 he made his first one-day international appearance, against New Zealand. He came to England in 2000 and played for Hampshire in the County Championship, where he took over 100 wickets.

Highlights: 1994 Wisden Cricketer of the Year. Man of the Match in Australia's 1999 World Cup final victory over South Africa. Selected in Wisden's Five Cricketers of the 20th century, alongside greats such as Sir Donald Bradman and Sir Viv Richards.

He says: "If you can put a batsman off by saying something to him, then he's got a problem."

They say: "I'd take Warne. He is a magnificent bowler, one of the best spinners of a cricket ball at the moment, with superb control of leg spin, flipper and googly." Former umpire Dickie Bird picks his all-time Test XI.