Shane Warne: My Autobiography

Shane Warne: My Autobiography (2002) is the first of Shane Warne's two life-story books, written with journalist Richard Hobson and covering the Australian leg-spinner's rise, his record-breaking bowling and the early scandals that had already made him a tabloid fixture. Warne died of a heart attack in March 2022, aged 52; his fuller, more reflective second memoir, No Spin (2018), completes the story this book only got halfway through.

The book: what it covers

Published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2002 (with a Coronet paperback edition following), My Autobiography takes Warne from a self-described "frustrated" teenage leg-spinner through his 1992 Test debut to the ball that made him famous outside Australia: his very first delivery of the 1993 Ashes, which spun sharply past England's Mike Gatting to bowl him at Old Trafford, still known simply as the "Ball of the Century." From there the book covers his central role in Australia's rise to Test dominance through the 1990s, his own account of the craft of leg-spin and sledging, and — candidly for the time — the scandals that had already broken by 2002: the revelation, in 1998, that he and teammate Mark Waugh had taken payments from an Indian bookmaker for pitch and weather information in 1994, and the tabloid "phone sex" scandal involving a British nurse in 2000.

What it doesn't cover, and why No Spin exists

Because My Autobiography appeared in 2002, it necessarily stops short of the chapters of Warne's career that many readers now associate with him most: his year-long ban in 2003 after testing positive for a banned diuretic on the eve of that year's World Cup, his continued Test success up to a then world-record 708 wickets — a mark Muttiah Muralitharan passed in 2007 — his final Ashes series in 2006-07, and his long second career as a commentator and media personality. Those later years are told instead in Warne's own No Spin, published in 2018, which reads as a more settled, retrospective account than the newsier, still-mid-career voice of this first book.

Reading it today

The value of My Autobiography now is less as the definitive Warne story — that role belongs to No Spin — and more as a period document: it captures how Warne, and Australian cricket, talked about the game's biggest scandals while they were still fresh, before two more decades of hindsight, further controversy and his own death had reshaped how those events were remembered. Read alongside No Spin, the two books effectively bracket his career: the first written by a player still mid-story and still on the defensive about his public image, the second by a retired elder statesman of the game looking back with the benefit of distance.

Warne's place in the game

Whatever view a reader takes of the book itself, the cricket underpinning it is not in dispute. Warne made his Test debut for Australia in January 1992 and retired after the 2006-07 Ashes having taken 708 Test wickets — a world record at the time, since passed only by Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan — to go with more than 3,000 Test runs as a genuinely useful lower-order batsman. He was a key member of Australia's 1999 World Cup-winning squad, and is widely regarded by players, statisticians and analysts as not merely the greatest leg-spinner the game has produced but one of the greatest bowlers of any kind in cricket's history — a revival, more or less single-handed, of an art that was widely considered to be dying out when he made his debut. He was posthumously appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to the game.

	My Autobiography	No Spin
Published	2002	2018
Written with	Richard Hobson	-
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton	Ebury Press
Covers to	2001-02	Full career and retirement

Warne took 708 Test wickets across a 15-year career and remains, statistically and by near-universal acclaim, the greatest leg-spin bowler the game has produced — a case this book makes in his own words, for roughly the first half of the story. For his complete Test record and place in the game's history, see this site's Shane Warne legends profile.