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Shane Warne and Mind Games

By Neetu Sharma - Thursday, August 6th, 2009   |   190 views   |  

So what is new?

I recently read somewhere that Shane Warne said that he had something like 8 names for the delivery that he bowled like a leggie but went straight on.
I didn’t make much of the comment as it wasn’t something new.
We all knew that.
But then I read some articles here and there that talked about how Shane Warne used mind games to get him all those wickets and that he used to talk the batsmen out.
Again, what is new about that?
As a mere viewer I knew that Warne had all off 2 deliveries with minor variations.
One was his leg break, some of which that turned a mile and others that turned just about enough.
The second one was his straighter one, which he bowled at a varying pace.
He rarely bowled the googly and his flipper, straighter one, the one that zipped through, were all one and the same; only differing in speed.
So if I knew that, you knew that, do you really think other batsmen did not?
Surely they would have known that all those different deliveries that Warne talked about were bluffs.
But knowing the deliveries and playing them are two entirely different things.
Plus Warne was the master of mind games. He read the batsmen well, he almost knew what the batsman was looking to do, and that is what got him all those wickets.
He may have had a lot of names for his deliveries, but even an average pacer has more varieties than Warne did.
But this is old news, is it not? Surely Warne has not suddenly opened our eyes to the fact that he really had only 2 deliveries.
What he has done though is made me wonder whether a spinner really needs so many variations.
Probably not.

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