Monday Milestone: Ball of the Century
“Can I remember Gatt’s face? It looked like someone had nicked his lunch”
– Graham Gooch from the non-strikers end following the Ball of the Century
This Week in History
1993, June 4,
Shane Warne produces arguably the most famous leg spin delivery in cricketing history to Mike Gatting during the Ashes series.
Warne moves in with his casual, innocuous stride. The ball is released, there’s an almighty flick of the wrist. It begins to drift, a good yard or so down the leg side. Then, the ball pitches, it grips, it fizzes back past the outside edge of Mike Gatting’s bat, clipping the very top of off stump….
We’ve all seen the delivery, countless times since the 1993 Ashes series featuring a legitimately youthful Shane Warne. Peroxide hair, overflowing with confidence, only at the beginning of an incredible career. Long before the drug scandals, the betting scandals, the sex scandals, the smoking scandals, was a fresh faced Victorian on his first Ashes tour beginning his first ever spell at Old Trafford.
Mike Gatting stood at the other end. Well renowned for the way he played spin, I’m quite sure he eagerly awaited the battle and relished the opportunity to dispatch the inexperienced spinner to all parts of the ground once he got settled and got his eye in…
However, that young blonde spinner, with only eleven test wickets, stepped into his run up on the Old Trafford playing surface like so many before him, but instead delivered the Ball of the Century.
As the ball spun towards him, Gatting then watched the ball pitch well outside leg stump, so with no way he could be out leg before wicket, it was a simple case of prodding forward, and it didn’t matter whether the ball hit the pad or the bat. His defence was solid. Right?
Wrong.
Of course we know now that there was just enough space for Shane Warne’s gripping leg break to pass the bat and manage to remove the off bail. Time stopped. Nobody had any idea of what had happened. It was Warne’s first ball. It was supposed to be a loosener.
Instead Australian wicket keeper Ian Healy, who had the best seat in the house, threw his hands up, elated. Warne pumped his fist, and the Australian team erupted whilst Gatting stood there for a few moments dumbfounded.
What had just happened? How was it possible? It couldn’t be. But it was. He was gone. Gatting simply looked bewildered, shrugged, and headed back to the pavilion.
The legacy of the delivery was that it was much more than a simple Test wicket. It put Shane Warne on the map, and in a cricketing age dominated by fast bowlers in the Caribbean, suddenly kids in the cricketing world were trying to replicate that piece of magic. A whole new generation had been awakened to the antiquated art of leg spin bowling.
And now, almost almost twenty years since Shane Warne spun his way into the history books, it still remains among the more remarkable cricketing moments ever. The career of Mike Gatting, despite his ten centuries and 4,400 Test runs, will always be remembered for that one ball, and his bemusement as he left the ground.
Even now I’m don't think he knows quite how it happened.
Milestone Five: Famous Shane Warne deliveries
5. Alec Stewart. 1994-95. One of many dismissals of Alec Stewart, Warnie sends down a remarkable quick flipper that catches the Englishman unaware.
4. Graham Gooch. 1993. Shane Warne bowls an Englishman in fine form around his legs, when the leg break rips out of the rough. Gooch hardly even offers a shot.
3. Basit Ali 1995-96. Last ball of the day at the SCG, after conferring with Healy for some time, Warnie bowls the Pakistani through his legs.
2. Shivnarine Chanderpaul. 1996-97. Warnie grips one out of the rough, in his own words “the most I’ve ever turned a delivery” at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the West Indies.
1. Mike Gatting. 1993. Shane Warne rips out arguably the greatest delivery in his first Ashes ball on English soil, bowling Gatting for four in what the press dubbed “the Ball of the Century”.
