Shane Warne Special: 18th Anniversary of "The Ball of The Century"
To all you scientific bugs out there! Ever heard of the Magnus Effect?? huh!!
No?
Got it eh?
Not quite sure though whether the Australian Spin Legend Shane Warne knew about it either but he did produce a Magnus effect anyway. Confused?
Well, let me then take you some years down the memory lane. Some eighteen years back.
The Ball Of The Century
It was the Day 2 of a highly anticipated first Ashes Test of 1993. A spin friendly wicket at Old Trafford meant Warne, as the lone spinner in the Australian line-up, had some task up his sleeves to do. In the run up to the Test, however ,Warne had played just a handful of matches with a rather modest average of 30.80 runs per wicket, grabbing a total of 31 wickets. But what transpired on that fateful day left the world dumbstruck as they saw the rise of one of the greatest legends that the game of cricket had ever produced.
After a moderate performance with the bat by the Australians, England certainly had the upper hand in the Test. A great opening stand for England meant that they had capitalized on their slender advantage and were now riding high with the score on 71 for no loss. It was not until Mike Atherton was dismissed by Merv Hughes that the Australians managed to provide some semblance of a resistance. However, their joys were short-lived, as out came one of the best English batsmen of all time, Mike Gatting.
In a desperate move to get a wicket, Allan Border turned to his rookie leg spinner Shane Warne. It was a gamble considering Gatting was an excellent player of spin. However, with the talent that Warne possessed, one may argue it was certainly a calculated decision.
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 towards the batsman and with the ball rapidly spinning, it drifted toward the right and ended up bouncing several inches outside Gatting’s leg stump. A technically sound batsman that Gatting was, he quickly responded by thrusting his left leg forward towards the pitch of the ball, and pushing his bat next to his pad. It was certainly a sound move with the intention that the ball will hit the pad or the bat. Since the ball pitched outside the leg stump, the batsman couldn’t have been adjudged LBW, and just in case, had the ball spun slightly more than expected, it would have hit the bat and bounced safely on to the ground.
However, the ball spun in a miraculous fashion as it went passed the outside edge of Gatting’s bat, and clipped the top of his off-stump, dislodging the bails. Gatting was left bewildered as he stared on, failing to believe his fate. There was jubilation in the Australian camp as the rest of the world saw the might of this incredibly talented leggie.
England, on the other hand, never recovered from that shock and went on to lose the match by 179 runs.
A lot was made of that wicket and Gatting’s England team-mate, Graham Gooch was quoted as saying -
“He looked as though someone had just nicked his lunch.” - mocking Gatting’s rotundity
Today, 18 years from that very day, Warne tweeted about the incident as he thanked Gatting for the reminder.
Well, certainly, we the cricket fans, need no reminder and surely the ‘miracle’ ball will always remain in our memories as long as the game will be played. After all, it was not named the “Ball of the Century” for nothing.