Aussies welcome return of the king

Familiarity that stretched beyond the cigarette smoke that Shane Warne exhaled as he took the field hung in the air as the champion legspinner undertook for his first training session in Australian colours since drawing the curtain on his gilded career more than seven years ago.

Warne is back in the Australian fold as a consultant cum mentor – don’t call him a coach – largely due to the presence of his great mate and current national coach – though Warne likes to see him as more a full-time mentor – Darren Lehmann.

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There was something about the way Warne, never one to risk over-training given his remarkable natural aptitude for the game, stood idly by while the Test and recently-arrived Twenty20 squad players completed their warm-up and fielding drills that harked to days gone not-so-long by.

When the players then moved to the nets at the opposite end of the stunningly picturesque Newlands ground from the team dressing rooms, Warne soon became a magnet for a few former teammates and some who never got to share the dressing sheds with him to pick his brain.

He explained a few theories about bowling plans and field settings to Nathan Lyon, employing water bottles as if they were tin soldiers in a mock battle scene.

He provided encouragement and offered advice when he thought it prudent to rising young legspin prodigy James Muirhead – whose inclusion in the Australian squad for the upcoming ICC Twenty20 World Cup was tailor-made for Warne’s tuition – as well as veteran wrist spinner Brad Hogg, who played with and lieu of Warne numerous times in his never-ending career.

Even finger spinners Lyon and Glenn Maxwell benefited from his input.

As the session wore on, Warne slipped seamlessly back into the character that was a dominating – at times polarising – influence on the Australian set-up that carried all before it on the back of his bowling brilliance for the best part of 15 years.

“Booowling,” he drawled, as one of the spinners fizzed past the edge of a speculative bat.

Then, with most of the specialist red ball batsman already making their way back across the Newlands turf to the changerooms and with skipper Michael Clarke still looking for new bowlers to test himself against, the challenge became too much for the now 44-year-old leggie.

Perhaps he – like Clarke – had heard the press men standing behind the net, where one had asked of the other ‘Has Shane bowled?’.

To which Clarke momentarily broke from his innings, thinking the question was actually ‘can Shane bowl?’, and offered an unsolicited reply: “He certainly could not that long ago”.

Soon after, Warne completed a couple of cursory stretches, rotated his overworked right shoulder a few times at not quite terminal velocity to shake free some cobwebs, and began flicking a ball from right hand to left as he did so many times at the top of his mark in Test, one-day and first-class cricket.

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A couple of steps, the swivel on the front foot and the trademark grunt as the ball was released and was invariably followed by a sharp intake of breath, as if a wicket had been cruelly denied him even though at least one of his initial deliveries was a rank half-tracker.

For those dozen deliveries or so, time reverted to his previous visit to Cape Town in 2006 when Australia – without his long-time partner in wickets, Glenn McGrath, in the fold – inflicted a three-nil whitewash on Graeme Smith’s South Africa.

Or to his swansong summer, when he led Australia to an historic five-nil Ashes whitewash over the old enemy, a feat nobody thought would be seen again until Clarke managed to achieve it just seven years later.

Asked about his role within the Australian team, which will continue throughout the coming Test and the following Twenty20 matches against South Africa but not the T20 World Cup where Warne will be working instead as a television commentator, he was keen to make one point very clear.

“Consultant - not a coach,” he said, when queried as to how would label his position description.

“I'm a consultant.

“I'm here to be with the Test guys every day, be around the group and just help out.

“Boof (Lehmann) just said 'whatever you see – if you want to have a chat with someone about anything, just (do) whatever you want to do'.

"Then during Test match days, the Twenty20 spinners will come in and I'll work with them for a few hours each day.

“Just get in the nets and work on tactics.

“Being (played in) Bangladesh and Dhaka - every (T20 World Cup) match is in Dhaka - so the wickets are going to get tired as the tournament goes on.

“The spinners play a huge part in Twenty20 anyway, I think they'll play an even bigger part in Bangladesh.

“Working with those guys, young (James) Muirhead, Hoggy, Maxwell - I worked with him today and Nathan (Lyon) as well.

“So I'll help out the Test group in this environment, then once the Test starts I'll help out the Twenty20 guys prepare for their World Cup.

“I'm not sure what the actual title is - I've said I'm a consultant.”

Just don’t call him a coach.

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