‘With Warne Gone, It Is Now Up To Me To Pass His Teachings To Younger Players’

Former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting has condoled the untimely demise of Shane Warne, saying it is now his duty to pass the teachings of the legendary spinner to the younger generation.

Warne had passed away on Friday aged 52 due to a suspected heart attack. “He was a teacher through his commentary and I’ve seen hundreds of photos over the last 24 hours of all the spinners he worked with. He helped Steve Smith in his younger days and Rashid Khan has been catching up with him – just imagine the conversations they would have had. So I feel it is now up to me whenever I get an opportunity to just let the world know what he was like and pass on some of the things I learnt from him,” Ponting said on the ‘ICC Review’.

“I woke up nice and early I was getting the kids ready to go to netball and Rianna (Ponting’s wife) looked at her phone and told me the news about Warney. I grabbed the phone out of her hand to look at it and I couldn’t believe it and it is still the same now. It was so raw to me I couldn’t really speak and every time I thought about him and our experiences and our journey together and I just got short for words,” he added.

When asked what would he really want to say to Warne, Ponting said: “I would say just how much I love him. I didn’t say that to him and I wish I did.”

Ponting also reflected on the special memories he had with Warne admitting he was in awe of some of the leg spinner’s friends, while also paying homage to the type of man he was.

“If you spent a day with him it was amazing to see some of the names flashing up on his mobile phone. It was very rare for Warney just to be sitting at home. He would always try and find time for his friends and his family and that was one of his great strengths,” said Ponting.

“The more people talking about Shane, the thing that will shine through will be just how loyal he was to family and friends and how loved he was. He had the energy that drew you to him and that is a trait that not a lot of people have,” he added. Warne was one of the most influential cricketers in history. He almost single-handedly reinvented the art of leg-spin when he burst onto the international scene in the early 1990s, and by the time he retired from international cricket in 2007, he had become the first bowler to reach 700 Test wickets.

A central figure in Australia’s ICC Cricket World Cup triumph in 1999, when he was player of the match in both the semi-final and the final, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack recognized Shane’s achievements by naming him as one of its Five Cricketers of the Twentieth Century.