He comes dressed in a Ralph Lauren T-shirt, designer denims, light-brown leather shoes and the easy smile of a man comfortable in the company of others. “Shane Warne,” those who knew him had said, “you will like him – impossible not to.” He stretches out his hand, looks you in the eye, betrays a hint of vulnerability and, effortlessly, gets you on his side.

Through the entrance into the Lord’s clubhouse, he turns back to say hello to the doorman. “Nice to see you again,” he says. In the corridor there are others, MCC members, staff, who go out of their way to greet him. The respect is not a surprise but the warmth is telling. In this hallowed home of English cricket, how many Australians are greeted like returning heroes?

When we get to the roof terrace, he asks if we mind him having a cigarette.

“Still smoking those,” says Clare, who works at Lord’s and whom he knows from previous visits.

“Well,” he says, “you don’t expect me to give up all of my vices.” He is now 38 but his flirtatiousness is ageless.

We all look out over the wonderful setting at Lord’s, the smooth green surface, the white stands, the sense of battles long fought, but what about that pitch? So flat, so unyielding, and so many drawn Test matches.

“Can anyone remember a cricketer winning a Test match here?” someone asks.

The cricketer in our midst pipes up. “I can’t ever remember losing a Test on this ground,” he says. His record at Lord’s for Australia was played four, won three, drawn one.

THE LAST time he played a Test in this city was September 2005 at The Oval. Memorably for him, the match ended with England’s fans serenading him: “We wish you were English.” It was a peculiar little moment because there he was, part of an Australia team losing the Ashes, the sickness of defeat was in his gut, yet he struggled to suppress an inward smile.

“I have always loved coming here. When they sang that, it was unreal. After all the years of getting bagged, it was amazing to hear that. English cricket fans appreciate good players, they know how hard it is to be a good leg-spinner and it is hard to be a wristy.

“I hate losing, full stop. Losing to my brother at marbles was a problem for me, but at The Oval I turned towards the crowd, spread my hands out and said, ‘Thank you and I love you too’.”

This morning he has had a 40-minute run through Hyde Park, his second during a five-day visit to England. He looks leaner now than during the last years of his Test career, says he is in better shape than he has been for a long time and feels he is in a good place at the moment. “My kids are unreal; I’ve got a good relationship with my ex-wife, Simone. I’ve always been a good father. I may not have been a wonderful husband, but even during the difficult times, Simone always said I was a good father. Brooke is 11 now, Jackson 9, Summer 7, I love them to death, would do anything for them.”

He’s not that long back from India, where he skippered the Rajasthan Royals to victory in the inaugural Indian Premier League (IPL) and was reminded of what it was that he loved about playing cricket. When he retired from Test cricket after the 2006-07 Ashes series, he envisaged a couple more seasons with Hampshire and that would be it. Then the men with the money showed up and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The experience exhilarated him, and when his team won the tournament on the last ball of the final over, it was one of the finer moments in a magnificent career.

“In almost 20 years of playing the game at the highest level, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the intensity and passion from a crowd like we had in the IPL, except for maybe the Ashes. The beauty of the competition was that I could bowl to Sachin Tendulkar in Rajasthan and a 70,000 home crowd would be cheering for me to knock over an icon of world cricket that is Indian. That was unbelievable.”

He agreed to skipper the Royals provided he could also be the coach. The team he was given was a motley crew, some good players but also a few who had won competitions to earn a place in the squad. They were thrashed in their first game and nobody foresaw them contending. Warne, though, was never just the greatest bowler. He would run the Royals the way he believed cricket teams should be run.

“I retired from Test cricket so I could have more time with my kids, but I’d also grown tired of this other stuff you get in the game. It’s called the ‘professional era’ but I don’t think it works very well. You have a coach for this, a coach for that, you have got too many recovery sessions, too much mental stuff, too many team meetings, too much training for training’s sake, and it all takes away from the actual sport.

“To me, the captain must run the show. You train hard and then get out there and play. In Rajasthan, if we had a day off there were no meetings or any of that rubbish. If people needed to go to the gym or wanted a session in the pool, that was their business. When we weren’t training we sat around and spoke about cricket, how to construct an over, how we would beat the next opposition, and we went from being no-hopers to IPL champions.”

He says no matter what he tells people who weren’t there, he can’t properly describe the occasion. Still, he tries. On the way to the ground, fans of the Royals ran alongside their team coach, banging on the exterior, chanting, pumping their fists. When the stadium filled, there were still 10,000 Royals with painted faces locked outside. Coming to the end of the second-last over, he was on strike, the Royals needed 12 to win, and he bludgeoned a four.

“I’m a believer in fate, and I just knew we were destined to win that final. We’d won three or four games off the last ball or in the last over and I thought, ‘We’re meant to win this’. So I was relaxed as we got to the last ball and still needed a run to win. Sohail Tanvir was on strike. I said, ‘Whatever happens, watch the ball, swing as hard as you possibly can and then run fast’. ‘Skipper,’ he said, ‘I’m going to do this for you’. It was a pretty amazing thing to hear.” He looks forward to the Champions League with the Royals and to next season’s IPL. After that, who knows? If he keeps running, stays healthy and can keep running the team his way, there might not be any reason to stop, because his love for the game is undiminished. He arrived from Australia last weekend and watched hour after hour of England’s first Test against South Africa at Lord’s. For most, the match petered out into a tame draw, but he was absorbed by the tourists’ performance in dragging a draw from the wreckage of the first two days.

Michael Vaughan, he believes, may have got the strategy wrong. “Vaughan is crucial for England to regain the Ashes next year because he is such a good captain, but once he made the decision to enforce the follow-on, I thought it was always going to be hard, because it is extremely hard to bowl twice in a row. At Hampshire, I never once enforced the follow-on. Had I been in Michael’s position last weekend, I would have declared at 500 at tea-time, but once they batted the whole day, they reduced their options.” And what does the king of spin think of England’s young spin bowler? “Monty is a very good bowler, but he has a lot to improve. To me, he is a bit one-dimensional. That might be a little harsh, but he bowls about the same every time. I know he has a few subtle variations, but he could do so much better than he is doing. Once he’s played 50 or 60 Tests, he’ll know how to handle himself.

“I would like to see him vary his pace, get it down to 40mph, then up to 60, change his position at the crease, have a plan. For a long time last weekend I felt he didn’t have a plan but was waiting for the batsman to make a mistake. You’ve got to understand that’s it not where the ball pitches but how it got there.”

He has been contacted by most of the world’s spin bowlers, Panesar included, and has told them what he knows. Openness is part of his character, to give is part of his nature. At Hampshire, he nurtured a young Kevin Pietersen. “I told Kevin everything I knew and was impressed by how much he wanted to learn. We haven’t had much contact lately, but for me, we have only scratched the surface of his talent.

“He has as much talent as anyone that has ever played the game. I really believe he could be brilliant. My biggest worry is that he gets a bit far above himself and doesn’t keep his feet on the ground. He’s got to remember who his friends are. If he keeps that in mind, he will be all right.”

Is Pietersen better than Tendulkar? “With Kevin, it’s extraordinary potential. Sachin has done it, the best batsman I’ve bowled to. Very hard to split him and Brian Lara, but for me, Sachin was the hardest to bowl to. Early on we [the Australia team] tried to sledge him and he made three or four hundreds in a row, so we then befriended him. He and I have become very good mates, we text each other a lot.”

We talk about sledging. He accepts it as part of the game and doesn’t agree with the notion that cricket would be better without it. He mischievously wonders what a bowler is supposed to do on days when he feels flat and less than keen for the fight. “That’s the day, Allan Border told me, you stare at the batsman and say, ‘What are you looking at, mate?’ He answers you back, you now have an enemy and you’re ready for the battle.” And what did he say to Paul Collingwood during the 2006-07 Ashes? “I will tell you exactly what I said. He was ripping into me, saying stuff, so I said, ‘Mate, you’re actually making me concentrate, so thanks for that’. He kept going, so I hit back. ‘Paul, tell me, are you embarrassed about your MBE? Don’t you think you should send it back? You’ve played one Test match in the Ashes, made seven and 10. I mean, mate, I would be embarrassed if I were you. But if you do send it back, I’ll pay for the envelope and the stamp’. He went pretty quiet after that. Sledging is actually made out to be more than it is and 10 years ago it was far worse. Now there are too many cameras, too much super slo-mo, and the players have to be politically correct.”

Freddie Flintoff is, of course, one of his favourite players. He loves the way the guy goes about the game, but there is no sentimentality about his assessment of England’s best allrounder. “With Fred’s batting, he is probably a No 7, but the way England put their side together, he fits best at No 6 and you must use him as an impact bowler. He should bowl three five-over spells a day, you can’t overdo it with him. The younger blokes, like Broad, should carry the workload.”

On every cricket question, his opinions are thought out and intelligent. Out of the blue, I mention that a friend of his half-joked that women would be his ruination. For a moment, he is the boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He’s not offended, not indignant, just momentarily uneasy. “I am,” he says, “a red-blooded male, it is one of my . . . no, don’t write that. I’m now single, I am free to do what I want on that side of things.

“Hopefully, one day I will meet the right person. I was very lucky to meet a wonderful lady in Simone. Unfortunately, after 10 years of marriage, it didn’t work any more. It was both our faults. I put my hand up and said I did the wrong thing. I hope that one day she meets someone she is happy with. We’ve got a great relationship now and I want her and me to be happy. I am not looking for anyone at the moment because I’m happy with my life, but if I meet someone, great.”

And the singing England fans at The Oval three years ago, they knew their man.

Shane Warne’s Indian summer

Shane Warne, 38, announced his retirement from 15 years of Test cricket after Australia completed their Ashes whitewash at Sydney in January 2007. He ended with 708 Test wickets and claimed his 1,000th international wicket in the final Test.

He also said he was quitting State cricket with Victoria but vowed to complete the remaining two years of his contract as captain of Hampshire. In the event, though, he did not return for the 2008 season after signing a £230,000 deal to captain and coach Rajasthan Royals for two seasons in the inaugural Twenty20 Indian Premier League. Despite spending less than their rivals on recruiting players, and fielding a team that included winners of a competition to play in the IPL, Rajasthan won the tournament by beating Chennai Super Kings in the final in Mumbai to claim the £1m first prize.

Warne also works on an ad hoc basis as a spin bowling coach for the Australian Cricket Board – he has a ‘Leadership in Cricket’ role with Cricket Australia, with a brief to mentor young players. Away from cricket, he is an ambassador for the VW car company, left. He promotes a poker website and has played in several big poker tournaments, including the Aussie Millions. He lives in his native Melbourne.