Warnie's way back

Shane Warne has got back to bowling, for the first time in ten months, and the man in charge of putting his career back on track says that the process has begun at just the right time, in order to get Warne ready for international cricket by February 10, the day his year-long ban ends. Terry Jenner, the former Australian legspinner widely acknowledged as Warne's mentor, supervised a short session at the Adelaide indoor nets which Warne had rented for an hour, and says that starting earlier could have been counterproductive.

"Imagine if we had started two months ago, gone through the whole process and he would have been ready to bowl," Jenner says, "and then he comes out here, looks out of the window and sees Stuart MacGill bowling. That would have been shattering. The way he looks at it right now is that he is not ready to bowl."

Jenner, who now runs coaching programmes in England in Australia's winter, has his own term for what he thinks Warne will have to rebuild to get back to the physical condition needed to play international cricket. He calls it PEP. Power in the shoulder, Energy in the hips, and Pivot. And add another P to that: Patience.

"He will have to be patient," Jenner says. "You can't just turn up, flip your fingers and presto. He has to rebuild slowly. That's why we have started this two-month process. It was a short session today. But it will grow longer and longer and hopefully, by February 10, his action will be as close as possible to what it was before the break."

"The spin's there. But it's not consistent. Some spin, some don't. The shoulder, the wrists, all parts of his body need a workout. It will take a few weeks for him to put it all back, get his rhythm going, get his confidence back."

What challenge would he face from MacGill, who has used this period most profitably, claiming 43 wickets in eight Tests at 25.11, with a strike rate of 45.9 balls per wicket? MacGill, while acknowledging Warne's status as the "greatest spin bowler to have walked the planet," had in a tongue-in-cheek way questioned his claims to mystery balls. "There are only so many balls you can bowl and there's only so much your wrist can rotate," MacGill had said. Jenner's response to it is illuminating.

"Stuart is right," he says. "There are only five basic balls. The legbreak, the topspinner, the backspinner, the flipper and the googly. But you can vary the legbreak. The difference between the Warne legbreak and the McGill legbreak isn't the amount of spin, but how it lands, where it arrives at the batsman. Warne's legbreak arrives at the batsman's eye, and disappears towards his left ear if he's a right-hander, and then turns. That makes it so hard. MacGill's legbreak arrives at the right eye and keeps on going the same way because he is so round arm, and it gives the batsman 20:20 vision. He gets a lot of spin from his action, which is a plus. But the minus for him is that there is no curve on his legbreak; he gives the batsman a very good look at it."

One year is a long time is international cricket, particularly for a player on the last quarter of his career. There is the loss of wickets - Warne has been stuck on 491 while Muttiah Muralitharan has been closing in on him rapidly - and then there is the loss of considerable money. "There are two ways to look at it," Jenner says. "He can come back refreshed. Or he can come back frustrated. I am hoping he'll come back refreshed. Then there will be three or four years at least of him bowling around the world, which will be magnificent for cricket and magnificent for legspin bowling. He has revitalised the art of legspin, and few more years of him might be what cricket needs."