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I remember attending SCG test matches in the late 90’s with my grandfather.
He is a big cricket fan; big enough to have my grandmother wrap tinnies of Fosters Special in wax paper so they resembled bread rolls, just so he didn’t have to miss a ball while standing in the horrendous SCG bar queues.
For him there was nothing better than to take his grandkids along with his illegal alcohol to the Sydney Test.
But what made this era an extra special one for my Pop was the emergence of Shane Warne.
Watching Warne bowl got Pop as excited as someone a tenth of his age.
He would watch patiently, politely clapping good shots and parochially calling for an LBW decision, until the time Warne was called into the attack.
Then he would reach into his seemingly innocent esky of food to unwrap a wax paper covered tinnie and sit back to enjoy the show.
Warne brought the excitement of spin bowling back to an old leggie, and it was assumed he would do the same for any wrist-tweaking youngster just starting out on their cricketing journey.
And we waited for those youngsters to develop.
But it’s now a generation since Shane Warne first burst onto the cricketing scene with his golden hair and questionable extra curricular activities.
During his reign, the Earl of Twirl single wristedly brought the art of leg spin back to the forefront of every cricket fan’s mind.
If we believed the hype, and there was no other choice but to believe it, Warne was going to prove the ultimate recruiting tool for the leg spinners’ guild. Its members espoused that we would soon see hundreds of little Warnies rolling their wrists as they practiced their stock balls and googlies.
But 20 years on from the Sheik of Tweak’s admittedly inauspicious debut, there has been no flood of teenagers filling the wrist-spin bowling vacuum created by the sheik’s abdication.
This is a curious predicament, and one that is now very much threatening to cost an Australian team desperate for an edge.
So where have all the leggies gone?
The selectors briefly saw in Cameron White, a leg-spinning all-rounder, a potential new Victorian hero. New South Welshman Steve Smith was led to believe he was the future, and then quickly became the past.
Though there is still time for someone like Smith, the fact remains none have been able to rust themselves onto a Test team that is in dire need of a front line wrist-spinner.
Right now Australia’s number one slow bowler is Nathan Lyon, a toiling off spinner who has youth on his side but may not have the time. Lyon is under enormous pressure to make more of a mark and take the crucial second innings wickets that Warne once made his stock and trade.
To highlight the desperate situation that the selectors find themselves in there are reports that Cameron Boyce from Queensland and Adam Zampa from New South Wales are in the running for a shock call up for the coming tour of India.
Cameron Boyce has 22 First Class matches under his belt, a lengthy career in these days where national selectors pull the trigger on picking players quicker than Wyatt Earp did at the OK Corral.
Boyce is a grizzled veteran compared to Zampa, a young man who showed promise in his one, yes one, First Class match. It must be noted that Warne was also plucked from relative obscurity, although he had played for Australia A.
For the sake of my grandfather’s and Australia’s cricket future, the best case scenario is one that sees any of these young men, or some hitherto unidentified wristy, come along out of the current wrist-less wasteland.
Like a tweaking Mad Max from the abyss he would guide the baggy greens through the perilous tours that wait on the sub continent and the old dart and have the locals flummoxed with his wrong’uns and zooters, and emerge victorious.
The worst case?
Well, we may not necessarily want to think of that. But it would probably look something like a smug Englishman holding aloft a tiny urn.
Indeed may we say ‘come in spinner!’
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