Warne’s competitive nerves are as remarkable as his ability to turn the ball

It is never a bad idea to keep a spot of mystery around your lead character. In an extreme form, it can be highly effective to keep him out of sight altogether, building up the tension by teasing mentions, anecdotes and the inexorable motion of the plot that leads at last to the entrance of the feared and longed-for character who has dominated our hearts and minds in ever-more-compelling absence.

Tartuffe did it in the eponymous play by Moliere; Harry Lime did it in The Third Man; Shane Warne has been doing it in the unfolding drama that will, in Wisden 2006, be memorably entitled ‘Australians in England’.

This is one of the great build-ups-by-absence: but now the vital strand of narrative must be unwound. Enter Warne.

The early reels of the epic have been one of a rusty and discomposed Australian side being given every chance to get thoroughly warmed-up and into the groove in the various one-dayers. Only now, as they begin to find themselves and to extort some kind of humility from England, can they introduce the finest bowler on the planet Earth. You have got to admire the dramatic nerve of the whole thing.

Warne has retired from one-day cricket. He has instead spent his early summer playing for Hampshire, scoring a century and suffering a separation from his family.

The question is inevitable: where does he go from here? It is the question that was asked after operations on his spinning finger and on his shoulder; it was the question that was asked when he was banned from cricket for a year after taking drugs.

In sport patterns tend to repeat themselves until the athlete or athletes get too old. In other words, then, the likelihood is that Warne will repeat what has gone before: unless you are prepared to demonstrate that, at 35, he really is too old. There is money to be had in going to bed with celebrities, as many celebrities have learnt to their cost.

‘My Night of Passion with Aussie Spin King’ may have cost Warne his marriage, and it has certainly cost him his happiness this season. But will it cost Australia the Ashes?

Look at it from Warne’s point of view. You hate to be alone, you don’t cook, you feel unloved and for the best of reasons. Life is totally out of joint. Then you join a crowd of people who think you are wonderful, with whom you have always had great times and in whose company you have always achieved the greatest things in your professional life.

Do you mope and mourn ? or do you plunge into touring life as if it were a warm bath on a cold day? It is all in the way that these things take you (as Graham Thorpe will explain) but Warne has never seemed like a man cut out for moping.

He has without doubt been the No. 1 cricketer to watch during the past decade. As golfing people will boast to their grandchildren of watching Tiger Woods, tennis people Martina Navratilova, footballing people George Best and motor-racing people Ayrton Senna, so cricketing people will talk about Warne.

Warne’s competitive nerve is as remarkable as his ability to turn the ball. He doesn’t bowl good balls, he bowls good overs, goods spells, good innings, good matches. Above all, he bowls good series.

If you took every England player at his very best, then the two sides are not very far from being equal. In all cases bar one. Warne is the difference between the two sides. In the company of the very, very good, Warne is exceptional. That much is beyond debate: the question that remains is whether or not he will be quite exceptional over the next five Test matches.

Surely this is his last Ashes series in England, quite probably his last Ashes series ever. Will he find inspiration in such a thought? The Pope is, I believe, a Catholic.