Warne Announces Retirement: 21/12/06

RonPrice

We all connect to celebrities and their lives in our own individual ways. I wrote this piece in the hours after watching Warne's announcement of his retirement.(i.e. about 12:30 pm 21/12/06) This piece of writing is, as I say, an individual perspective and is not written to aim at populist consumption. If you like it...that is a bonus for me....if it does not turn you on---just stop reading.It's a sort of semi-quasi-eulogy on Warne's announced retirement with two tests to go to conclude The Ashes for 2006/7.-Ron Price, Tasmania.

PLAYING AND SPINNING

At 1 p.m. on the summer solstice, 21/12/06, one hour before the George Town Bahá’í community's Devotional Meeting, Shane Warne announced his retirement from test cricket. It was George Town's 43rd Devotional Meeting and Warne's 15th year in test cricket. Warne was not yet two years of age when I arrived in Australia in July of 1971. To list all his achievements here would lead to prolixity here. This handsome, easy-going, athletic 37 year old formally announced the end of his cricket career this afternoon. I sat in our lounge-room looking out over the Tamar River, enjoying the cloud cover after a week of horrific fires in Tasmania. The media were out in mass to hear Warne's final words and I was on the edge of my seat ready to head to our Devotional Meeting where three people awaited my wife and I and where we spent a stimulating two hours. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 21/12/06.

You've had quite a career, Shane,
since you landed in Victoria in '69.
We had just landed on the moon
that winter and I had just started
teaching school in Cherry Valley--
and it was not very sweet, if I recall.

It seems, indeed it is, a lifetime
ago Shane! We stood too close,
to your cricket prowess, for our
generation to really see you, Shane.
We do not comprehend yet. And…
thirty-seven years is such a short life.
We need to get further away from
these years of yours: 1992-2007.
But we are beginning to understand.

I play a different game than you,
Shane, and my script, Shane, is
part of another drama in the world's
history, written as it is on tablets
of chrysolite, endless scenes there
are before my final hour in that
garden paradise, that eternal kingdom,
where I will abide for evermore amidst
glorious meads, far from this mortal cage.

For I , too, will one day retire, Shane.
The media will not be there to ask me
questions and cheer me on in soap-opera
fashion. I will not be on the day's news.
I will go silently like the carcass of a dog
into a hole for those who speak no more.1

I will put away this mortal frame,
these days that are less than a fleeting
moment and wing my flight unto the
Placeless Paradise. Will I play cricket,
Shane? What will I spin and play then?

1 The Báb, Selections, Haifa, 1976, p. 19.

Ron Price
21 December 2006

David · Joined: 03 Oct 2005 Posts: 31 Location: Maidstone, Kent

Ron, nice post - but you really are wasting your time posting cricket related topics on here. Go to 'Announcements' and click on the thread 'I'm Outa here' and follow one of the links to a proper cricket forum. See you there I hope.

And spammers, don't bother!

Mr. Cricket · Joined: 06 Jan 2007 Posts: 2 Location: UK

One word for shane warne and that is LEGEND. Exclamation