On this day: Shane Warne bowled the ‘ball of century’ to stun and impress Mike Gatting

On this day, in 1993, legendary Australian spinner Shane Warne stunned the cricket world with a delivery that bamboozled and impressed England batsman Mike Gatting at the same time. Warne got the ball for the first time at Manchester, his first ever on English soil.

The pitch was damp and there were a few patches as well. Bowling over the wicket, Warne bowled a massive leg spinner which pitched way outside the leg stump and went on to hit the top of off stump. Gatting was stunned as he stood in his crease trying to process what just happened.

The Aussie leg-spinner had bowled the ‘ball of the century’, one to remember for ages for cricket fans around the world.

Years later, Warne explained the aftermath of the iconic delivery in 1993 Ashes.

“I was 23 when that happened. I remember going to the Windmill Pub in London, we were staying at the Westbury Hotel 100 yards up the road … and I went for a pint with Merv (Hughes),” he told Fox Cricket in an interview.

“And when I came out there was, without a word of a lie, probably 25-30 photographers just taking pictures. The next day was about ‘Shane Warne was at the pub’. I was getting critiqued about what I was wearing, I had ’10 things you don’t know about Shane Warne’ and I’m reading it going, ‘that’s not true, I didn’t know that about me!”

Gatting and Warne got along well despite being a part of cricket’s oldest rivalry. Warne even got a ‘lovely letter’ from Gatting and Graham Gooch when they got retired from international cricket.

Source: IndianExpress