SOMETHING close to a revolutionary change has taken place in Test cricket in the past ten years and if it has not gone unremarked it has most certainly been underestimated. When Shane Warne was picked for his first Test match for Australia, in 1991-92, the other spinners operating in Tests that season were Venkatapathy Raju, Ravi Shastri, Don Anurasiri, Dipak Patel, Shane Thomson, Phil Tufnell and Jimmy Adams. With apologies to Tufnell, the Artful Dodger and Old Cholmeleian, not exactly a vintage crop.

A decade on, we have Muttiah Muralitharan, Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh, Saqlain Mushtaq, Daniel Vettori, Stuart MacGill and Warne himself to lead the field. Some of the finest spin bowlers of all time are among us and any team without a spinner of high quality seems now to go into every match with a handicap.

No one appreciated at first what a benison had blown down on cricket in the person of Warne. That was understandable because in Tests at home to India and away to Sri Lanka in his first season in the limelight, he took four wickets for 386 at a cost of 96 runs each.

Australia selectors tend to know quality when they see it, however, and in his home city of Melbourne against West Indies the following season he took seven for 52 in the second innings to win the match. The famous in-dipping, wickedly turning leg break to Mike Gatting at Old Trafford and his first 34 wickets against England followed in 1993.

Only injuries have prevented him from cutting swaths through opposing batsmen since with bowling of extraordinary accuracy and a consistently vicious leg break, regularly pitched not around middle and leg, but outside the batsman's legs and eye-line. Players have got after him from time to time, of course, among them Hansie Cronje, by bold hitting against the spin, but Warne has usually had the last laugh and this is a man who, by nature, laughs a lot.

His variations, originally mainly a googly and a flipper, have become less dangerous since operations on his right shoulder and main spinning finger, but he is intelligent as well as intensely competitive and justifiably confident. He regularly takes wickets now with a simple top-spinner that runs straight on past the sweep shot with which so many try in vain to counter him. He has also played useful innings at important times and made quite brilliant catches at first slip.

With 450 wickets from his first 101 Tests at 26 each, including 21 five-wicket analyses and five match hauls of ten or more, Warne's place in history is secure. He is not, however, what the Australians would call an absolute shoo-in for the best Rest of the World team since 1953, for the simple reason that the embers of the art of wrist spin had been kept alight before he arrived by another bowler of genuine greatness, Abdul Qadir, of Pakistan.

For sheer mystery and disguise, Qadir made that other master of deception from Lahore, Kipling's Kim, look like an amateur. Many a batsman managed to play a long innings against him -Derek Randall and David Capel among them -without being sure which way the ball would turn. His very approach was furtive, with long, springy strides and eyes looking to right and left, like a criminal in the shadows.

Like Doug Wright, England's only postwar leg spinner of world class, Qadir suffered from bowling balls that frequently beat the bat by too much. He bowled significantly more bad balls than Warne, too, but by guile, spin and bounce he still took 236 wickets in 67 Tests. Nor, with 15 five-wicket hauls and ten in a match five times, was he a lesser match-winner. In Pakistan, Mushtaq Ahmed was his by no means unsuccessful imitator and Danesh Kaneria looks to be the next in line.

Two other leg-break bowlers, superficially similar perhaps, must also come into the reckoning. Bhagwat Chandrasekhar had an even better record than Qadir, 242 wickets at 29 from 58 matches, taken with fizzing leg breaks, googlies and top-spinners bowled at medium pace from a thin right arm that had been withered by polio as a child. The ball swung fast and straight from the shoulder as if controlled from above by an unseen puppeteer. With Bishan Singh Bedi and Erapalli Prasanna, he was chiefly responsible for India's most successful period in Tests.

Without Kumble, their most recent teams would have been much the poorer. Although he sometimes bowls the ball as fast as Chandra, he, too, is a unique bowler, wonderfully accurate, not a big spinner of the ball but still deceptive in the flight and, like Chandra, as likely to spin the ball into the right-handers as he is to brush their outside edge.

Like Chandra, too, he makes the ball bounce awkwardly. It will not be long before he has added the milestone of 300 one-day international wickets to the 319 already taken in Tests.

Of all the wrist spinners, Warne has to be the choice, but because of the obvious good sense of having an off spinner as his partner, it means leaving out one of my favourite cricketers, Bishan Bedi. Alf Valentine, Hedley Howarth and Vettori have been fine bowlers of left-arm orthodox spin, but Bedi was the best and most beguiling. As heavily built as a bullock, he nevertheless drifted in to bowl as if tiptoeing on a cloud in slippers. He took 266 wickets for India at 28 and he was a lovably fiery character.

The choice of the off-break bowler is possibly the hardest of them all. Muralitharan is clearly going to take more wickets than any of them, probably than any bowler of any type, ever. To be picked now, he has to be deemed better than Hugh Tayfield, Lance Gibbs, Prasanna and Saqlain. Indians hope Harbhajan will prove to be as effective against other nations as he was in his great series against Australia last year, and Australians would put in a bid for Ashley Mallett and Bruce Yardley. They were not in the exalted class of the first five, though, and Harbhajan still has something to prove overseas.

Tayfield, Gibbs and Prasanna had everything that used to be required in an off spinner: accuracy, strong spin, flight and away drift. The two great contemporaries, Muralitharan and Saqlain, have something new, though. It is the ball spun with an off-break action over the back of the hand, making it turn away from the right-handers and thereby adding the advantage of mystery that good wrist spinners have always had.

Saqlain was the pioneer and if the googly is the Bosie to Australians, after B. J. T. Bosanquet, this ball should be the Saqie. But, like Harbhajan, Muralitharan has learnt the art and, since he spins the ball more viciously, he beats even more batsmen through the air or off the pitch. Many people think he straightens his bowling arm unfairly -he has been called for throwing in Australia -but he has satisfied ICC examiners that his prodigious spin comes from rotation of the wrist.

He is a charming cricketer and a magician of a bowler whose performance against England at the Oval in 1998, when he took 16 for 220, was the greatest exhibition of off-spin bowling since Laker's at Old Trafford. Muralitharan partners Warne and good luck to their opponents when the pitch starts to wear.