Shane Warne's ODI Career, the 1999 World Cup and Rajasthan

Leg-spin was supposed to be a red-ball specialism. For most of the 1980s the received wisdom in one-day cricket was that a wrist-spinner would be hit, and a captain who picked one was picking a luxury. Shane Warne's limited-overs career, 194 matches and 293 wickets, is one of the main reasons that wisdom stopped being repeated.

A containing bowler who also took wickets

The shape of Warne's one-day bowling is unusual in the same way his Test bowling was. He was expensive by the standards of an off-spinner and cheap by the standards of everyone else, and he was used in the middle overs to do two jobs at once: hold the scoring rate down and remove the set batter. Captains gave him his ten overs almost in full, more or less every match, and rarely had to hide him.

The mechanism was the same one that produced the Test record. He bowled a stock ball that could be pushed through flat when a batter came down the pitch, and he had a top-spinner that hurried on and hit the pads of anybody trying to work him to leg. In an era when a run rate of five an over was considered brisk, a leg-spinner conceding a bit over four while taking a wicket every thirty-odd balls was worth two other bowlers.

He also fielded well and batted usefully at eight or nine, which mattered more in fifty-over cricket than in Tests. None of it made him a specialist white-ball cricketer. It made him a Test bowler whose method happened to survive the transfer.

1996: a semi-final won and a final lost

Australia reached the 1996 World Cup final with Warne as the senior bowler. The semi-final at Mohali was the match that put them there: Australia made a total that looked short, West Indies were cruising towards it with two wickets down, and then lost eight wickets for a small number of runs in a collapse Warne started and finished. Australia won by five runs.

The final in Lahore went the other way. Sri Lanka chased down 241 with more than three overs to spare, Aravinda de Silva making an unbeaten hundred after taking three wickets, and the tournament belonged to a side that had spent six weeks attacking the first fifteen overs harder than anybody had before. Warne's part in the final was ordinary. It was the first of two World Cup finals he played in, and the only one Australia lost.

1999: two match awards and a trophy

The 1999 World Cup is the tournament his one-day record rests on, and it very nearly did not go that way. Warne's form in the group stage was poor enough that his place was being discussed publicly, and Australia lost two of their first three matches, which put them in a position where every remaining game was effectively an elimination fixture.

What followed was the best sustained stretch of white-ball bowling he produced. He finished the tournament with 20 wickets, level with New Zealand's Geoff Allott at the top of the list, and took four in each of the last two matches.

The semi-final at Edgbaston against South Africa is the most replayed one-day international ever played, and Warne's four for 29 is the part of it people forget. South Africa were chasing 214 and had the game under control at the top of the order; Warne removed the openers and then Jacques Kallis, and turned a straightforward chase into an equation. The match finished tied, with Allan Donald run out off the fourth ball of the final over with the scores level, and Australia went through on their position in the Super Six table. Warne took the match award.

Four days later at Lord's he took four for 33 as Pakistan were bowled out for 132 in 39 overs. Australia knocked the runs off in 20.1 overs for the loss of two wickets, the most one-sided World Cup final on record, and Warne was named player of the match again. Consecutive match awards in a semi-final and final is a rare thing to have on a one-day record.

2003: sent home before a ball was bowled

Australia's next World Cup, in 2003 in South Africa, was the one that ended his one-day career. Warne was sent home before Australia's opening match after returning a positive test for a banned diuretic, and was given a twelve-month suspension. He was thirty-three.

Australia won all eleven of their matches without him and beat India by 125 runs in the Johannesburg final, Ricky Ponting making 140 not out. The side's ability to win the tournament in his absence was noted at the time and is worth stating plainly: Australia's one-day squad in that period was deep enough that the loss of its best spinner did not change the outcome.

He never played another one-day international. He came back after the ban and played Test cricket for another four years, and the decision not to return to the fifty-over side was in part his own — he had already indicated that the schedule was unsustainable — and in part a selection judgement about a bowler entering his mid-thirties. It leaves the one-day record ending abruptly, at 293 wickets, with what would have been a natural last act missing.

He had also captained Australia in one-day cricket for a short spell in the late 1990s when Steve Waugh was unavailable, and won nearly all of those matches. He was never made Test captain, and the reasons were never entirely cricketing ones.

Rajasthan Royals, and a captaincy that changed the format's assumptions

The last significant thing Warne did in the game was to win the first Indian Premier League season, which almost nobody expected and which he engineered largely through selection and man-management rather than through his own bowling.

Rajasthan Royals were the cheapest squad in the auction and had no marquee batter. Warne captained, coached in all but title, and picked young Indian players ahead of better-known imports on the basis of what he had seen in the nets. Sohail Tanvir, whose action looked like an error, took 22 wickets and the Purple Cap with a best of six for 14. Yusuf Pathan and Ravindra Jadeja went into the tournament unknown and came out of it as household names. Shane Watson was named Player of the Tournament.

Rajasthan won eleven of their fourteen league matches and topped the table. The final at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai went to the last ball: Chennai made 163 for 5, Rajasthan replied with 164 for 7, and Pathan took the match award. It remains the only title the franchise has won.

The reason it mattered beyond one season is that it demonstrated something about the competition's economics before anybody had worked it out from a spreadsheet. A squad assembled cheaply, run by a captain who trusted uncapped players and set unconventional fields, beat sides built around expensive names. Every franchise league since has produced a version of that result, and the 2008 season was the first.

The franchise figures, and what they say

Warne played four IPL seasons, all for Rajasthan, and his own numbers were solid rather than remarkable.

Season	Matches context	Wickets to date
2008	Title-winning captain	Leading bowler in a title side
2009	South Africa, second season	Continued as captain
2010	Third season	Captain
2011	Final season	Captain

Across those four years he took 57 wickets in 54 matches at an average of 25.39 and an economy rate of 7.27. With the bat he made 198 runs in 27 innings at 9.9, with a highest score of 34. The economy rate is the number worth pausing on. Twenty20 in 2008 was a format nobody had bowling plans for, and a leg-spinner going at a bit over seven an over, in the middle overs, on Indian pitches, was doing something that the coaching manuals had not yet caught up with.

The wider point is that Warne was a good enough reader of a game to be useful in a format that did not exist for most of his career. He was thirty-eight when the first IPL was played and thirty-one when the first Twenty20 match was staged in England. His last competitive seasons were spent in a version of cricket that his own career had helped make possible, since a format that punishes predictable bowling was always going to reward wrist-spin.

What the limited-overs record adds up to

Set against 708 Test wickets, 293 one-day wickets look like a footnote, and they are usually treated as one. That undersells two things. The first is 1999, a tournament Australia won because their leg-spinner produced his two best white-ball performances in the two matches that could not be lost. The second is the demonstration effect: every side now picks a wrist-spinner in white-ball cricket, and the reason they do is that Warne spent a decade proving the economics worked.

The Test record and the England rivalry are the larger part of the career, and the craft that produced it is the more instructive part. For the full career and IPL figures, see the Shane Warne profile. For where the 2008 title sits in the competition's development, the Indian Premier League archive has the season-by-season record.