'25-30 photographers were taking my pictures' - Shane Warne recalls his changed life after bowling the 'ball of the century'

Shane Warne is one of the best spinners cricket has ever witnessed. He is the second-highest wicket-taker in Tests ever with 708 scalps to his name in 145 matches besides 293 ODI wickets. The leg-spinner’s boasts of strong numbers but first he came into the limelight in 1993 when he was just 23 years old. Warne delivered a ‘ball of the century’ to Mike Gatting to castle him around his legs.

This led to the media in England focussing completely over the then young spinner from Australia. He was everywhere in the newspapers the following days and recalls being clicked by a plethora of photographers outside a pub in London.

“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). And when I came out there was, without a word of a lie, probably 25-30 photographers just taking pictures,” he said while speaking in episode four of ‘A Week with Warnie’ on Fox Cricket.

I was criticised for what I was wearing

Shane Warne also remembers the fact that he was criticised for the clothes he wore while at the pub and there were articles about his unknown facts in the newspapers as well. Interestingly, the 50-year-old claims that the facts weren’t true and the media had painted their own picture.

“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!’” he added. Shane Warne was always the controversy’s favourite child during his career.

But the former cricketer is disappointed with the way the media handled it and how often a lot of fake stories were created about him. “I didn’t really understand how it worked when I had to read these things about myself that weren’t true which was quite tough to take.

“You don’t want to spend your life worrying about that stuff, but I did. I worried. I was like, ‘that’s not what I’m like’. So I found that I didn’t understand how it (the media) worked and I resented it,” Warne further said.