It is more than 13 years since I faced my first ball from Shane Warne. No matter how much time passes, I am still asked about it regularly and I expect I always will be. And now he is coming to the end of his career as unquestionably the greatest leg spinner in the history of the game.

I suppose I can say that “I was there” at the moment he first indicated his potential to the wider world. There or thereabouts, anyway.

In 1993, we didn’t have the exhaustive analysis of opponents that goes on in international cricket today. We watched a few clips of Warne before the Ashes series that year, but there was no slow-motion analysis or close-ups of his hand action.

He had played in a few county games before the series started and he had not pulled up many trees. From the footage, we saw that he could turn the ball. We probably did not realise how much he could turn it.

He was fortunate at Old Trafford because there had been a lot of moisture around before that first Test. On the first day, the bowlers’ spikes had made imprints into the softer ground and by the time we batted on the second day, the turf had dried out, so there was more purchase for a spinner than normal on a second-day pitch.

I went in at No 3 and had made four when Warne came on for his first bowl of the series. The first thing I remember about that ball was the amount it drifted into me from off to leg. You expect that sort of drift from a wrist spinner — it suggests that there are plenty of revolutions on the ball and it is therefore likely to turn — but I had never faced a ball that swerved so much. As he approaches retirement, Warne still gets drift occasionally, but nowhere near as much as he used to get.

So I knew the ball was going to turn when it landed, but the question was, how much? Even if you have faced a clever leg spinner, you can never be sure how much he will turn it on a particular pitch on a particular day. Peter Philpott, the former Australia leg spinner, used to talk about how he could bowl a big leggie and a smaller leggie, a big googly and a smaller googly, just by holding the ball differently. Warne, over the years, has proved himself a master of bluff by bowling the same ball with a slightly different grip and varying the degree of turn.

Anyway, as everyone knows, that particular ball at Old Trafford spun a long way. I heard a gentle click behind me, suggesting that a bail had been dislodged, but not the death rattle you normally hear when you have been bowled. My first reaction was that Ian Healy must have knocked a bail off. But then I realised he was appealing, so I checked that my back foot was in my crease and looked across at the square-leg umpire.

Then it dawned on me. The ball had obviously clipped the off bail after it passed my outside edge. Having pitched way outside leg stump, it had somehow found just the right angle to go past quite a wide fellow with a bat in his hand and nudge the off bail. It was extraordinary.

I had grown up facing leg spin, but for some of the younger members of the England team this was completely new. When I was making my way in county cricket, there had been Intikhab Alam, Robin Hobbs and Harry Latchman, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was next to no one.

Even in international cricket, there were only really Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, of India, and Pakistan’s Abdul Qadir to compare. Qadir was perhaps the nearest equivalent to Warne, a strong bowler who really put some spin and drift on the ball. He had plenty of variations, but he used to bowl plenty of bad balls, so you only had to wait. Warne, on the other hand, did not have as many variations, but he was amazingly accurate and still gave the ball a big rip.

Thanks to him, there are many more leg spinners in the game. People talk about how much he has done for Australia, but he has done an awful lot for the sport as a whole. Like Ian Botham, he has worked hard and he has played hard. We may not see his like again.

Devil delivery

The ball that bewildered Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993 is known as the “ball of the century”

. . . and turns 18in to hit the top of off stump