If you couldn’t sleep last night, you’re not alone. If you’ve been walking around your living room just muttering, “but he’s Shane Warne. No, that couldn’t have happened to Shane Warne,” you’re not alone. If his sudden passing away feels personal, like you’ve lost someone at home, even if the closest you ever came to Shane Warne was watching him weave his magic on TV, then you’re not alone.For, in the trying hours following the heart-wrenching announcement that Shane Warne was no more, and it still doesn’t feel real typing this, what we’ve learnt is that he meant a lot more to us than what any of us had imagined. He wasn’t just a legendary spinner whose magical skills we simply grew up admiring. He wasn’t just the first cricketer to really go mainstream and become a crossover celebrity, if not an integral part of pop culture around the world. He wasn’t just the bowler who delivered the ball of the century.Like he did with hundreds of batters around the world, Shane Warne had unbeknownst to us become a part of our very psyche. Some have since said he defined genius with a ball in hand. It’s safe to say that what he did if anything was more cerebral. Such was his allure and magnetism, the leg-breaks and flippers aside, that Shane Warne ended up defining their very existence for a generation of millennials as they entered a new millennium.
