Shane Warne an overrated spinner : Sir Garfield Sobers

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WEST Indies great Sir Garfield Sobers reckons Shane Warne was overrated. More... West Indies great Sir Garfield Sobers says Shane Warne an overrated spinner Will Swanton From: The Courier-Mail September 21, 2010 Gary Sobers said Shane Warne was a great bowler, "but I'm not sure how well he compares with spinners overall. I think people get carried away with this man's ability ..." Source: The Courier-Mail WEST Indies great Sir Garfield Sobers reckons Shane Warne was overrated. Sobers makes his staggering claim in a book released today in England called In a League of Their Own. He uses his foreword to shoot down the widely held perception in Australia, and most parts outside of Muttiah Muralidaran's homeland in Sri Lanka, that Warne was the sport's greatest slow bowler. Sobers nominates India's Subhash Gupte as the finest leg-spinner of all. "Someone who is called great from today's game is Shane Warne, but I have got my reservations about Shane," Sobers writes. "I think he is a great bowler, but I'm not sure how well he compares with spinners overall. I think people get carried away with this man's ability as he hardly ever bowled a good googly. "To me, Shane Warne is a great turner of the ball. I like his aggressive attitude, I love the way he attacks batsmen and I give him 100 per cent for that as not enough spinners bowl with that approach, but in my estimation Subhash Gupte was a better leg-spinner." Gupte played 36 Tests for India in the 1950s. He took 149 wickets at 29.55 with five five-fors. He died eight years ago but Sobers hasn't forgotten him. Sobers also has a dig at former England opener and block artist Geoff Boycott. "Geoffrey was a great player in his own style. He played within his limitations and didn't take too many chances with good balls or even half good balls. Great players have to take good balls and turn them into bad balls, but Geoff never seemed to be able to do that," he writes. Umpire Dickie Bird is more concerned with the disappearance of roguish characters. "Not as many players nowadays look as though they enjoy their cricket," he writes.

[Bradman99]

Hmm strange, disagree with him there.

[vamos_rafa]

Ok...So the greatest all rounder in the history is now doubting the credentials of arguably the greatest leg spinner. Well, we can't judge about Subhash Gupte as most of us have not seen him playing. So this is just his personal opinion.But the only case in point would be Warne's huge success against minnows in spin bowling players namely England and SA. And another case in point would be his performances against India or in general against sub-continent teams which are the better players of spin. I think he has struggled specifically against India and even to an extent against SL. And Warne's googlies were really not that great. No doubt he's a great bowler but maybe Gary does have a point here.

[ZodiaC]

He said this way back, didn't he? http://www.cricinfo.com/australia/content/current/story/238823.html I haven't seen him bowl, so no comments. Maybe he's right, but from what I've seen, Warne's indeed the greatest leg spinner.

[DomainK]

Warne will remain the greatest leggie ever for me. I have not see Gupte bowl, but I also have immense respect for Sobers.

[ravishingravi]

Since, none here have seen Gupte and Sobers is the greatest cricketer to set foot on the field, he would have some very valid reasons. Afterall, here is someone who slaughtered Richie Benaud.

[Fair Game]

A couple of things here, at least he bowled the bowl and not chuck it and secondly to use sober's logic I don't think lara was the west indies best batsmen because I think jimmy adams was better with no view or stats to back that up I just think adams was better. Get back to what west indians do best sobers and smoke some weed.

[ina_jawaan]

What makes a "great" spinner? I think it shows how great Shane Warne is that even after he lost the googly he was still able to take as many wickets as he did. Leg spin bowling was considered a dying art until Qadir and Warne came along. OK maybe he did take most of his wickets against England and South Africa but I don't recall too many Indian spinners having much success against those teams - certainly not away from home. Sobers is the greatest of all time - no doubt - but everyone has a price and he is trying to sell the book after all.

[jusarrived]

What makes a "great" spinner? I think it shows how great Shane Warne is that even after he lost the googly he was still able to take as many wickets as he did. Leg spin bowling was considered a dying art until Qadir and Warne came along. OK maybe he did take most of his wickets against England and South Africa but I don't recall too many Indian spinners having much success against those teams - certainly not away from home. Sobers is the greatest of all time - no doubt - but everyone has a price and he is trying to sell the book after all.

nice try defending match fixers :winky:

[ravishingravi]

What makes a "great" spinner? I think it shows how great Shane Warne is that even after he lost the googly he was still able to take as many wickets as he did. Leg spin bowling was considered a dying art until Qadir and Warne came along. OK maybe he did take most of his wickets against England and South Africa but I don't recall too many Indian spinners having much success against those teams - certainly not away from home. Sobers is the greatest of all time - no doubt - but everyone has a price and he is trying to sell the book after all.

Well, then you only missed about a decade of Indian cricket. Bedi, Prasanna, Chandra. Ring a bell !! All of them played after ban on SA was imposed. Almost no Indian spinner has toured SA until the modern era. It is always a big risk to pre-empt someone's intent based on perception. I never realized that Subhash Gupte was so famous, that he could increase the marketability of his book on his name.

[ina_jawaan]

Fair comment mate - I should not have been so dismissive of such a great player it is true. And it would be good to find out more about Gupte who was by all accounts, and as his stats prove, a great bowler. However, as things stand, all I can go on is the effect I have seen Warne have on the game. My elders and betters, who have seen far more cricket than I have, have all been gobsmacked by Warne's ability to turn the ball, to deceive the batsman and to outthink batsmen. And if Richie Benaud, who knew a thing or two about leg spin, rates Warne the greatest ever then I am not going to argue with him! Of course we don't know what the spin trio of the sixties and seventies (I don't really rate Venkat) might have done in South Africa. Although, I dare say, given the batting lineup South Africa had in the sixties and seventies, it would certainly have been a battle to savour! I can remember as a child in India in the seventies reading about the exploits of Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock and Mike Proctor and feeling cheated that they were not playing against India! But it sounds like an interesting book well worth reading............

[beetle]

People tend to romanticise their own time and everything associated with it.It's the "hamara zamana" syndrome.

[achilles]

Persona tends to play a major role in forming an opinion about someone.

[kumble_rocks]

Gary sobers is an overrated self pro-claimed expert . I still remember him putting David Randall is one top 10 test batsmen ever. So , he is wrong here...

[Clarke]

u guys have no jazba and junoon .. abdul qadir > warne has been proven yrs back, now u traitors wont accept gupte > warne

[Sachinism]

Article about Gupte from Daily Telegraph (2002)

Subhash Gupte, the Indian leg-break bowler who has died aged 72, was considered by no less an authority than Sir Garry Sobers to be the finest wrist spinner he ever batted against. This assessment is all the more striking when it is remembered that Sobers fought many a duel against Richie Benaud. Moreover, in his recent autobiography Sobers goes even further, judging Gupte to have been a better bowler than Shane Warne. Gupte, however, played in only 36 Tests, and rarely enjoyed the luxury of belonging to a dominant batting side which left him plenty of runs to bowl against. He performed against formidable opponents on perfect batting wickets, under captains who sometimes failed to set sensible fields and with fielders who were often unreliable. Even so, after only 18 Tests he had 10 times taken five or more wickets in an innings - a feat he achieved only twice more in the latter part of his career. It took him only 22 Tests to reach the mark of 100 Test wickets. Such was his early dominance that Mihir Bose, in his History of Indian Cricket, refers to the period 1953 to 1956 as "The Age of Gupte". Hero-worship spawned imitation, and Bishan Bedi was only one of the great Indian spinners of the next generation to find inspiration in their predecessor's career. Gupte seemed a small and slight figure to bear the weight of so much renown. Yet his frail, spidery physique lent itself to a classical high-armed action, the only oddity in which was a curious skip as he released the ball. He relished long spells, and never suffered from sore fingers, being very much a wrist rather than a finger spinner, with the ability to turn the ball on even the best batting wickets. His bowling combined unvarying accuracy of line and length with every permutation of flight and spin. Shane Warne, Sobers points out, is far flatter through the air than Gupte; in addition Gupte mastered not only leg break and top-spin, but also two different types of googly, one bowled with a lower arm. As he would also bowl the occasional leg break with a lower arm, batsmen were none the wiser. Subhashchandra Pandharinath Gupte, born in Bombay on December 11 1929, learned his cricket alongside thousands of other ordinary Indians in Shivaji Park. He first created a stir playing for Bombay University in 1947-48, and the next season played for Bombay in the Ranji Trophy. But his first Test, against England at Calcutta in December 1951, was inauspicious; in a dull draw he took no wickets and was dropped. It was therefore with some trepidation that the Indian selectors picked Gupte for the tour of the West Indies early in 1953. "The Three Ws" - Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott - were then at the height of their powers. Inevitably, they scored highly against the Indians. But they could not altogether master Gupte, who took 27 wickets in the Tests at a respectable 29.22 apiece. In all first class matches he claimed 50 wickets, more than twice as many as anyone else, and nearly half the 107 that fell to bowlers. The Indian community in the West Indies welcomed the tourists with particular enthusiasm, and at the first match in San Fernando, Trinidad, Gupte met his future wife Carol, who had been taken to the game by her Indian father. She watched entranced as Gupte took six for 29. In 1955-56, Gupte reached his peak, taking 34 wickets in a home series against New Zealand. Towards the end of 1956, however, he had a harder time against the Australians, hungry for success after their humiliation at Laker's hands in England. In particular, Neil Harvey put Gupte to the sword. When they first played against each other, Harvey was unable to spot the googly; he simply guessed that he would get one first ball, and dispatched it to the boundary. Yet Gupte kept his head under the onslaught, and the eight wickets he took in the three-match series were purchased at the by no means prodigal expense of 32.87 apiece. Over the two next years India played no Test cricket. When the West Indies visited India at the end of 1958, Gupte returned the remarkable analysis of nine for 102 in the first innings of the second Test at Kanpur; he would have taken all 10 if the last man had not been dropped by the wicket-keeper. When India toured England in 1959 Gupte, with 95 victims, was the leading wicket-taker. But in a hot summer, which should have suited him, he disappointed in the Tests, his 17 wickets costing 34.64 each. Uncharacteristically, he rather lost heart, as chance after chance went down in the field. After three Tests against Pakistan in 1960-61, Gupte was replaced in the Indian side by his younger brother Baloo. Yet he was back at the end of 1961, and against England at Kanpur showed that he had lost none of his skill as he took five for 90, including a spell of four for six in 18 balls. Gupte was still only 32, and still seemed to have a long international career in front of him. But in the next Test at Delhi he got into trouble after a hotel receptionist complained of being harassed over the telephone by one of the Indian players. The call in question was traced to the room which he shared with Amritsar Kripal Singh. Gupte, in fact, was wholly innocent. Riled, though, by the suggestion that he should have prevented Kripal Singh from bothering the receptionist, he reacted by giving a member of the Indian Board of Control the rough side of his tongue. He was informed that he would not be selected for the forthcoming tour of the West Indies. He never represented India again. Altogether Gupte played in 115 first-class matches, taking 530 wickets at an average of 23.71. His best performance was in 1954-55, when he claimed all ten wickets for 78 for Bombay against Pakistan Services and Bahawalpur. In Test matches he finished with 149 wickets at a cost of 29.55 each. As a batsman he rarely reached double figures, averaging 6.31 in Tests and 8.18 over his career. He played for Rishton in the Lancashire League between 1954 and 1957; for Heywood in the Central Lancashire League in 1958; and for Lancaster in the Northern League in 1960 and 1961. Representing Rishton against Accrington in 1956, he claimed two hat-tricks in one innings. Gupte was a jovial character, well liked in the game, though never afraid to speak his mind. After the end of his Test career he retired with his wife to her native Trinidad, where they brought up their two children. He died on May 31 at Port-of-Spain.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1397772/Subhash-Gupte.html

[thevortex]

Two different styles of googlies boggle the mind! Oh how I would love to have watched Gupte play! Has anybody watched Gupte bowling here by any chance? About Sobers' comment - I would respectfully disagree. Warne was one of a kind. Perhaps the only one. Marrying iron control with that much sidespin is just nothing short of being miraculously gifted. Yes, he did get a lot of wickets through aggressive appealing and bravado and bluster. That does not mean he did not bowl well though.

[vamos_rafa]

Gupte took 9 wickets in an innings and was denied the 10th won by the WK. Well that's a telling fact. Sobers's point is that Warne's flatter through the air as compared to Gupte and I always thought that Warne gave the ball a lot of air so just imagine the amount of loop this guy generated. But one thing worth noticing is that in the modern era there isn't any spinner who actually gives the ball a lot of air,the only one could be Murali but he was more into outfoxing the batsman. Rest almost all of the successful bowlers be it Kumble,Saqlain,Mushtaq-Ali-Ahmed,Harbhajan are a bit flatter through the air. I am not considering Swann here as he hasn't played for too long to be deemed successful. That is mainly because of the kind of tonking the batsman tends to give to these flighted deliveries nowadays, the perfect example of which would be Navjot Singh Sidhu. I think in a way that is one of the reasons why Warne was special because he gave the ball air and the drift that he got was exceptional. I think the demands of modern day cricket are different from the past era. Now almost all bowlers are bowling with flatter trajectories which was not the case then. Agreed that Warne's googlies weren't that great but nonetheless,he still bolwed old fashioned looping through the air balls and got wickets. Who knows Gupte would have been as suceesful or not.