The Last Larrikin
Depending on where you’re from, you’re either well-acquainted with a certain Shane Warne or you’ve never heard of him.
For those in the second group, ‘Warnie’ was one of the greatest cricket players in the world. His pioneering bowling techniques were the terror of batsmen, helping Australia dominate the sport for decades.
You don’t have to understand anything about cricket in order to read this post, but for the record here is a clip of him playing:
Warnie is also the greatest and perhaps final example of an Aussie type: the loveable larrikin.
This is a great man of charm and character who is so hopelessly flawed that it seems almost innocent; like a child. The larrikin is not evil. He just can’t help being what he is.
My favourite Warnie scandal was the one in New Zealand. A long-time smoker, he’d signed up with a nicotine patch company (or something) and agreed to quit. However, a Kiwi boy caught him smoking in the stadium and took a picture. Warnie took off after him and grabbed his bag, demanding he remove the film from the camera. Cops arrived and he returned the bag. He denied swearing at the lad.
Classic Warnie: falling off the tobacco wagon would have been a much smaller scandal that shirtfronting a kid, but this is Warnie.
He can do no other.
Shane was caught several other times smoking, often in places he wasn’t allowed to.
You might note that a lot of these stories are from Indian news sources. I don’t know if Indians quite understand the type, but they know the man very well. He is well-liked there – how could you hate a champion bowler who’s always smiling? – but is accepted as an intransigent ratbag.
One point that has gotten him into trouble over there is his inability to eat their food. This is not only an India thing – he has a famously limited palate, wherever he goes. One anecdote has him striding into the kitchen of a posh restaurant in an English hotel while he was playing county cricket. “How ya goin’, boys? Can ya just do me spag bol every night, no mushies? Cheers!” The star-struck staff were happy to comply.
Not one to hold his tongue, the near-superhuman Warnie was often at odds with his teammates. On one occasion he was suspended for two matches and copped a fine for “uttering a malicious statement against a co-cricketer”. Unfortunately I couldn’t find out exactly what he said but I’m sure it was pretty ripe.
This and other scandals led to him losing the Australian vice-captaincy on two occasions.
Career-wise, his biggest scandal was testing positive to a banned substance and getting suspended for a year. He claims his mum gave it to him as a weight-loss aid. Nice work, Warnie – blame yer mum why don’t you.
The one that did his reputation the most damage was when his charity for kids collapsed. It was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, but had probably been mismanaged. When it comes to overseeing complex organisations, Warnie’s a great bowler.
Shane’s love life attracted the most tabloid attention. Where to start? There was his affair with Liz Hurley. There was some sort of interaction with a British nurse that ended in him sending ‘derogatory’ text messages, which were leaked. There were orgies with lovers and prostitutes. A key quote from that article:
After the trio had sex, Warne left the apartment at 2.30am and drove to the cricket ground.
He slept in his car for a few hours before playing, and took seven wickets in his Hampshire side’s win over Middlesex.
Coming off the field, Warne said he was ‘tired out’.
That night he was contacted by the News of the World, who told him they had pictures of him having sex with the women – and Warne told them to ‘f*** off’.
There are too many scandals to do them all justice, so we must content ourselves with a summary: There was the time he got caught giving a bookie tips on weather and pitch conditions – probably a case of giving the simple Warnie money for nothing in order to groom him for later match fixing. There was the blow-up doll incident. The feuds with teammates. Claiming humans originated from aliens. Allegedly assaulting a porn star in a nightclub.
Triple M [radio] host and friend Warne Lawrence Mooney last year said: “His life is Tinder, beers, darts, gambling and cricket. Those five things, that’s it.”
This seems a bit unfair because Warnie was also a keen amateur golfer.
In 2022, Shane Warne died at the age of 52 while on holiday on the island of Koh Samui, Thailand. It was apparently a heart attack. Friends and doctors suggested it was ultimately due to decades of lifestyle choices.
Was Shane Warne a good man? By traditional Australian standards, he’s more what we’d call ‘a good bloke’. Underneath, he’s okay.
Such a larrikin is no longer tolerated in modern Australia. Any one of these dozens of scandals would have had him cancelled early on. Today, the larrikin has been crushed out of existence; controlled, moderated, kept out of sight. They mostly exist in outer suburban or rural obscurity, not in major stadiums or on the telly.
The larrikin, God bless him, never held or expressed strong political or social beliefs. He never tried to improve society, except for the occasional charity that went nowhere.
Above all, the larrikin cared nothing for what others thought of him. He was impervious to pearl-clutching and salt-smelling. No scolding could touch him.
Compare this to a modern Australian type: the virtue signaler. He would not be caught dead in an orgy, let alone invited to one, but that’s okay because his value comes instead from all his correct opinions, updated to the minute and widely broadcast.
It’s funny that a lot of foreigners in cricket-playing nations see Warnie as the archetypal Aussie, for better or worse. How disappointed Indian migrants must feel when they arrive on our shores and instead of blonde wildlings playing cricket on the streets, they find themselves living alongside multicultural, quiet, reclusive half-men whose politics are so intolerantly progressive that they seem reactionary.
It’s like how tourists visit Africa hoping to see round, thatched mud huts and spear-wielding, loin-cloth wearing natives, only to discover concrete cities inhabited by t-shirt wearing locals carrying Nokia phones.
The old national types, Australian or otherwise, were flawed and condemnable upon numerous grounds.
However, is the present move towards the global, culturally sensitive, very online Last Man really an improvement? In losing the wonderful patchwork of diversity, hasn’t the world lost something beautiful?
RIP, Warnie. May they serve spag bol daily in Valhalla.
Selected bibliography
From ‘Ball of the Century’ to his sexcapades: The life of Shane Warne
Shane Warne’s top 10 controversies: From affairs to alleged assault