On Warne

Love him or hate him, Shane Warne was the greatest cricketer of our time and remains a cultural phenomenon. His record on the field is astonishing and four years after retirement he's still the biggest name in the game. His presence off the field, on the cover of magazines, is only growing. But no writer has yet moved beyond the headlines to explain his character and appeal. Gideon Haigh is Australia's most talented, knowledgeable and incisive writers, acknowledged as the world's finest cricket writer. He's the lead cricket columnist for The Australian, a regular on TV and radio and has won prizes for his books. Gideon Haigh on Shane Warne is an irresistible pairing: 'the finest cricket writer alive' (The Australian) on the greatest cricketer of our times. The resulting masterpiece is as much about our fascination with Warnie as it is about the player himself. Who doesn't know the name Shane Warne? Now that the Australian cricketer who dominated airwaves and headlines for twenty years has turned full‐time celebrity and media event, his sporting conquests and controversies are receding steadily into the past. But what was it like to watch Warne at his long peak, the man of a thousand international wickets, the incarnation of Australian audacity and cheek? Our leading cricket writer, Gideon Haigh, lived and loved the Warne era, when the impossible was everyday, and the sensational every other day. In On Warne, he relives the era's highs, its lows, its fun and its follies. Drawing on interviews conducted with Warne over the course of a decade and two decades of watching him play, Haigh assesses this greatest of sportsmen as cricketer, character, comrade, newsmaker and national figure ‐ a natural in an increasingly regimented time, a simplifier in a growingly complicated world. The result is one of the finest cricket books ever written, a whole new way of looking at its subject, at sport and at Australia.