Shane Warne, one of the greatest cricket players of all time, and a larger-than-life figure on and off the field, died Friday in Thailand. He was 52.
The cause was suspected to be a heart attack, his management company said in a statement.
Warne was a bowler, the equivalent of a baseball pitcher. He was a master of spin, balls that don’t come in fast but instead twist and turn, potentially bamboozling the batsman. And few bamboozled more batsmen than Warne.
Playing for Australia starting at age 22, Warne took 708 wickets in multiday Test matches, and added 293 in one-day matches, making him one of only two players to take 1,000 international wickets, alongside Muttiah Muralitharan of Sri Lanka. During much of that time, Australia was the best team in the world, regularly vanquishing the likes of England, India, the West Indies and South Africa.
The specific type of balls he threw,…
