Date-stamped : 23 Mar95 - 14:34 Warne meets Lara Leg-spin blowing occupies that corner of a cricket enthusiast`s heart that a baseball fan reserves for the Brooklyn Dodgers. BOWLING out of the back of the hand with a cocked wrist is the most enthralling, extravagant and exasperating of cricket`s arts. Nothing can so exquisitely torment even the best batsman as a perfectly flighted leg break turning mesmerically across and away from him. No ball is harder to bowl consistently well; no bowl- ing seems more prodigal when it is not done well. In the era of one-day cricket and four-seamer attacks, leg-spinners have been deemed an old-fashioned luxury. Wrist spin has been a dying art. So it is scarcely surprising that the meteoric rise of Shane Warne, a pudgy 25-year-old bleach-blond Australian with an ear stud and prodigious talent, is being heralded as leg-spin`s second coming. Dewy-eyed cricker writers are discovering exam- ples of the breed all over -- Amil Kumble in India, Mushtaq Ahmed in Pakistan and Ian Salisbury in England. All are Shane Warne`s age or younger and are playing test cricket. The question is whether young Warne can live up to his admirers` claim that he is the best leg-spinner ever. Australia has produced a clutch of test-class leggies and four great ones: Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett and Bill "Tiger" O`Reilly before the second world war, and Richie Benaud after it. Even at 25 -- and still bowling with more gusto then guile -- Mr Warne looks their equal. He has taken 161 test wickets since his debut in 1992. Mailey and O`Reilly took 99 and 144 respec- tively in their international careers, when there were far fewer games. For the past six test series Mr Warne has been Australia`s leading wicket taker. At his present pace, he should easily overhaul Grimmett`s haul of 216 test wickets and mr Benaud`s 248. Not only is Mr Warne a prolific wicket taker, but he gets them cheaply. That is testimony to his exceptional control and his exceptional spin. Unlike more precise finger spinner, wrist spinners usually have to trade off control for their greater turn. Yet he bowls few bad balls. His relentless accuracy and venomous late turn make him an unorthodox and attacking opponent. Most leg-spinners flight the ball towards middle and off or off stump, aiming to hit the off stump or entice a false shot as the ball drifts away from the bat. Mr Warne does not so much wheedle batsmen out, as rip them out. He fires the ball in at a batsman`s legs, often exploiting the rough of the other bowlers` footmarks outside the leg stump, and can still get it to spin back enough to hit any of the stumps. That puts a batsman on the wrong foot from the start, making it harder for him to defend against a good ball. It also makes it riskier for the batsman to try to score runs by working with the ball away on the offside or by dancing down the pitch to drive -- the textbook ways of playing leg-spin. If that were not enough, Mr Warne can bowl a "flipper", a delivery that is the terror of even world-class batsmen. Few leg-spinners truly master it. It looks like a benign long-hop until it pitches. Then it shoots through fast and low. Posi- tioned for an attacking shot, a batsman must stab down at the ball at the last moment to protect his wicket. It looks horrible on the television replay if he is too late. Not for nothing was Shane Warne one of the Australian players the Pakistanis allegedly tried to bribe last year to play badly. But do his skills add up to the stuff of a cricketing god? Most of his test wickets have come against weak England and New Zealand sides. He will get a stiffer trial on the Australian tour of the West Indies, which begins with a match against Barbados on March 5th. So far Mr Warne has played four tests against the West Indies, but seven of the ten wickets he has made came in one innings at Melbourne, his home ground. The West indian team includes Brian Lara, who had an innings of 375 runs in a test against England in Antigua last year. He has the skill and left-handedness to take runs off Mr Warne. Leg-spin is less troubling to left-handers because the ball turns into them, rather than spinning away, which is the more menacing movement for a batsman. And the West Indians are likely to have three left- handers in their first six batsmen. Mr Warne can bowl a googly (a ball delivered to look like a leg break but which turns the other way, behaving like an off break). But he does not conceal it well. Pakistan`s captain, Salim Malik, who scored 537 runs off Australia in three tests last year without once losing his wicket to Mr Warne, says his googly is easy to spot. Even if Mr Warne does well in the Windies, there remains a long-term concern about whether his shoulder will hold up. He has already bowled more test match balls than Mailey and O`Reilly, and is bearing down of Grimmett`s and Mr Benaud`s to- tals. He complained of a niggling injury during the recent Eng- land tour of Australia. But if Mr Warne`s health and ability hold up -- and he es- capes the fate of Narendra Hirwani, a young Indian leg-spinner who dropped from sight after a meteoric start to his test career -- his place in cricket`s pantheon will be assured. That would be sweet for a reformed rouster who was once expelled from Australia`s elite Cricket Academy for "indiscipline" -- said to involve mainly beer and blonds (though his nickname, "Hollywood", derives from his looks, not his behaviour). He already has his disciples, the hordes of Australian boys who now make themselves into his image. Unless Lara & Co make the point moot, how long before cricket enthusiasts are feeling nostalgic for the dying art of seam? The famous four Leg spinners Overs M Runs W Avg Best RPO Shane Warne 1768.4 606 3833 161 23.80 8-71 2.17 Amil Kumble 1094.3 305 2510 99 25.35 7-59 2.29 Mushtaq Ahmed 556.2 105 1605 44 36.47 4-121 2.89 Ian Salisbury 234.1 24 933 16 58.31 4-163 3.99 Source :: The Economist Contributed by Ram Krishnan (rkrishna@garnet.acns.fsu.edu)