Beach Boy
Gideon Haigh
from The Monthly

In the Australian team of which he is the oldest, most experienced and
comfortably most famous member, Shane Warne is the great decomplicator.
People tangle themselves in theories, he complains, when cricket is a
simple game. Batsmen should block the good ones and belt the loose
ones. Bowlers are there to get them out. None of coach John Buchanan’s
Sun Tzu stuff for him; he prefers eternal cricket verities. Don’t force
it. Relax. It’s when Warne is relaxing, however, that the trouble
starts, usually involving some combination of fag, fix, phone and femme
fatale. No cricketer has so dominated both back and front pages of the
newspaper of his time – confirming in the process the truism about the
back pages chronicling only man’s successes, the front only failures.