The English press is predictably full of Shane Warne's retirement and most seem to have the tone spot on, focusing on the fact that the game is losing a legend rather than the fact that England might have a better chance against a Warne-free Australia....
CMJ gets the ball rolling in The Times paying tribute to Warne's influence on friend and foe and pointing out that he is the one member of their retiring old-guard that they will find impossible to replace.
It had to happen one day, but the news that Shane Warne will announce in his home city today that he is to retire from Test cricket at the end of the Ashes series will be as much a matter for regret as for rejoicing among the batsmen he has tormented for 14 years.
Also in The Times Mike Gatting reflects on his association with Warne, concluding:
Thanks to him, there are many more leg spinners in the game. People talk about how much he has done for Australia, but he has done an awful lot for the sport as a whole. Like Ian Botham, he has worked hard and he has played hard. We may not see his like again.
In The Guardian Gideon Haigh pays tribute to the influence of Warne and McGrath on Australia's success.
Steve Waugh was great. Ricky Ponting is. But no two cricketers so separated Australia from the rest of the cricket pack in the last decade or so as Warne and McGrath: the best slow bowler of all, and the best seam bowler of his era. It is a freak of nature that they should have coincided, and ended up playing more than 100 Tests together. To call them a combination, implying planning and foresight, is not quite right. They were more, as Palmerston described his coalition with Disraeli, an "accidental and fortuitous concurrence of atoms".
Sadly The Guardian lets itself down with an unamusing text-style timeline of his career.
In The Independent, James Lawton believes we will all be the poorer for Warne's retirement:
Shane Warne has shared with the greatest sportsmen of any age a truth about himself that has always shone like a diamond even when his life has been most chaotic and, let's be honest here, wretched. He has identified the best of himself. It has been to play his game, work his wiles so uniquely, at the bidding of the gods.
Also in The Independent, Angus Fraser bids farewell to someone he believes to possibly be the best of all time:
Shane Warne is the finest bowler cricket has produced and probably the greatest cricketer of all time. I say probably only because it is impossible for me to gauge how brilliant players like Sir Donald Bradman and Sir Garfield Sobers were.
The moment of his choosing will also have appealed to his sense of drama, being made in the middle of the most-hyped series ever ahead of two of the biggest-attended Tests. For great players the need to be asked why they quit, rather than when, seems vital for their esteem.
And also in The Daily Telegraph Martin Johnson believes Warne will be well suited for a possible career in TV coverage:
You'd guess Warne's being co-opted as an analyst, though his tonsils – as umpire Rudi Koertzen will confirm – are strong enough for him to eventually take over from Lawry, whose regular shrieks of "Got him!! Gone!!" are violent enough to frighten the cat into diving underneath the sofa.
In cricket itself, among the bowlers, the relationship between the hand and the ball is the most intricate in the case of leg-spinners. And, no man who bowled with the back of his hand has ever managed to coax the leather sphere to cooperate and co-author such a dazzling repertoire
