Johannesburg, March 5, 1994.
When Allan Border tossed the ball to him saying, “We need you, Warnie, Come on, get us a wicket,” the young leg-spinner was pumped up and jittery. In his own words, “I was in a state and wanted to show all the 40,000 people at the ground that I was going to fix them right up.”
The third ball from Warne bowled Andrew Hudson round his legs. Nostrils flaring, the leggie charged at the batsman, screaming, “**** off. Go on, Hudson, **** off out of here!”
The normally prosaic Wisden chronicled the event with the following words: “Rarely on a cricket field has physical violence seemed so close.” Ian Healy finally grabbed Warne and tried his best to stop him.
It was totally uncalled for and Hudson was not amused. Neither was the crowd who angrily booed Warne all through the rest of the day.
Warne confesses in his book: “Hudson is a good player and a lovely bloke, a good friend of my close mate Jonty Rhodes. Andrew had done nothing to deserve that sort of abuse. I look back at it now and wonder what was going on. The film of that incident is pretty awful, and the guy in the footage is not the real me.”
Neither were his teammates fascinated by what he had done. Paul Reiffel, the twelfth man, claimed that Warne had been rude to him when he had asked him for a few balls for a warm-up bowl. David Boon even commented that Warne had seemed tense and angry for the whole week.
It was not the only unsavoury incident that plagued the Australian side. Hughes, frustrated by the determined South African batting, got into an ugly abusive snarling match with a spectator and was fined thousand dollars as well.
At the end of the day, both Warne and Hughes had to appear in front of the ICC match referee Donald Carr. Warne was slapped with a thousand dollar fine.
On their way back from Carr’s room, Warne and Hughes had to cross the South African dressing room, and came face to face with Hudson. According to his book, “I [Warne] apologised to him straight away. I told him there was nothing personal in it and he was fine. In fact, most of the South Africans just had a good laugh about it all. They had no problems with me, which was a relief as the teams had been getting on very well.”
Well, the rest may be true, but the point about the teams getting on well may have been a bit stretched.
Text: Arunabha Sengupta
Illustration: Maha