"Big deal. Warne threw a ball at some sticks." The fat, blond kid from Ferntree Gully was dividing opinion as usual. This particular missive spectacularly missed the point.

Overlooking the libel about his action - Warne and throwing are alien to each other - it fails to grasp Warne's significance. Of course, the whole concept of aiming a ball at, or just outside, some wickets is silly and everybody involved in it - playing, coaching, reporting, watching, just plain loving it - should know that.

But its battles within between individuals also make it a fantastic team sport.

It is possible to play for yourself but you usually get found out. Warne transcended all this. Over time he came to defy the old truism that no man is greater than the game - though part of his greatness was that he would never have considered it. In this game, he has not been simply watchable, you could not take your eyes off him.

Some of this was to do with the spinning of a cricket ball from leg to off. It is one of the most ridiculously difficult things to do with a ball; ball after ball landing on the same spot with the monotonous regularity of the rent collector's call. He had a gift. However, it was not just the bowling. Within five minutes of realising how good he could be - he identified the date and place, 22 August, 1992, Colombo when with Australia's game up, he took three wickets for 11 runs in 5.1 overs - he undertook a transformation.

Warne became a showman.

These past few years - the 40 wickets in the 2005 Ashes notwithstanding - he was not quite the bowler he had been.

It mattered not. He was always good enough to make the batsmen work. They had more chance of a night's sleep at a rock concert than a restful time at the crease with Warne bowling.

He was perpetually on their case. As the years and the shoulder rolled on, bowling became a piece of theatre. It was becoming wearing, but then that was the conceit.

Warne appealed and appealed, ball after ball. He glared, he preened, he strutted before the umpire. In its way it was putting pressure on officials but that was not the objective. It was all part of eroding the batsman's selfbelief until he could take no more. He was forever jabbering at them, though he was also the first to offer congratulations and commiserations.

This made Warne a shrewd cookie. He recognised that it was a batsman's game and he set about debilitating the breed in any way he could think of, pushing at the boundaries of the laws. It was horrible yet compulsive. He has made much of the fact that he has never read a book from beginning to end - including, it is believed, his own autobiographies - but had he not had the combination of physical attributes which made him a unique leg spinner he would probably have been successful doing something else. Warne saw that if cricket was a business it was a business called show. "I used to go over the top occasionally with the appealing and those types of things, " he once said. "But that's me, that's me expressing myself."

That is another thing. He loves expressing himself and is a gift of an interviewee. In some ways. Once, after a close Hampshire victory, he came down from the dressing room to talk to a few reporters. One question in he was still going after three minutes. It seemed time to ask him another. "D'ya mind, I'm talking, " he said.

He wanted reassurance until the end. At the Adelaide Test earlier this month it was noticeable - Warne made a point of ensuring we noticed - that his old mentor, Terry Jenner, was in the nets. Jenner was dressed in civvies and occasionally, because he knows a lot about leg spin bowling, he would mouth something about the alignment of Warne's feet or some such. But that was not the point of the exercise.

He mentioned Jenner in his au revoir though not as often as he mentioned his former wife Simone, Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell. He cited Chappell as his greatest influence in cricket, the man who had said to him many years ago that the most important thing of all was to know yourself. Warne reckoned that after a long while digesting this he knew what Chappell meant and understood. So, forget the taking money from an India bookie and the ingestion of a banned substance, leading to a year's ban, as the aberrations of youth. His bowling and the effect he had on the game are what will endure long after his sexual appetite has become less fascinating.

"I suppose there's always going to be attention on what I'm doing, my personal life, who I'm involved with because of the way I played and what I achieved, " he said.

"It's nice to have that sort of interest but hopefully it won't be to the same level, the same scrutiny, the same moralising. But you guys will be the judge of that, not me."

He needs it, but we and cricket probably needed him more. He was a big deal all right, and he never threw a ball in his life.