Shane Warne

Neither he nor his group of loyal friends could have known that the less than a day he spent at Samujana Villas in Koh Samui, would be his last.

He sat in the conference room on the top level of Bophut police station, a short drive from the resort, as Warne’s friends told police about the lead-up to his death. When paramedics did arrive, they found Warne unresponsive with no sign of a pulse, police said, but continued trying to revive him at the villa, and after Warne’s friends carried him down the steps to the ambulance van. The group had planned to convene for a drink about 5pm. For the former cricket great, this was to be the start of a three-month sabbatical after a busy summer in Australia commentating on the cricket. Ever the caring father, as I was leaving, he headed up to his bedroom to call his kids.” “I have dined with Shane in many fine establishments, but rather than sample some of the local Thai fare, we tuck into a plate of Vegemite on toast.

Warne had 'just finished two-week health kick' before heart attack.

Prior to that he had tipped the scales at 98kg and said at the time his ideal weight was 80kg I haven’t had, whatever they call it, fillers, injections and all that sort of stuff.” I don’t know, I think it was just a massive heart attack. “I don’t know, he obviously smoked most of his life. I didn’t know that at the time,” Erskine said on Weekend Today. “It was a bit … all or nothing.

For it was the dinner break on the first evening of the 2012 World Series of Poker main event, and Warne had just snuck out through the hotel kitchens after ...

Not many megastars are quite so devoid of pretension as Warne remained to the end - even allowing for a hectic, jet-set lifestyle that only a man who burned at his wattage could have kept up with. And overall, he rarely got closer to a payout than in 2009, when his deep run in the tournament caused him to turn up a week late for his hugely hyped Sky Sports debut in that summer's Ashes. In 2018, I was privileged enough to witness the truth of Warne in its full majesty. That innate willingness to graft may have been at odds with Warne's showman persona, but it was a key part of the deceptive image that he was able to present throughout an astonishing 15-year career. Was there any player in cricket's history better at sowing doubt in his opponents than Warne? The knowledge of the moments in which he genuinely had the best hand and played it to perfection - and most things in that regard stemmed fromthe Ball of the Centuryat Old Trafford in 1993 - made his years of grift and bluster possible; those times in the late 1990s and early 2000s when his shoulder appeared to be held together by stringy pizza cheese, and only his multi-layered connivances were able to hoodwink a succession of opponents into tame and match-sealing surrenders. Every time he lost a hand, it was due to someone else's good fortune, of course, rather than his own dumb miscalculation, but the sheer nerdery in Warne's love of poker was never less than joyous to behold.