. . . the ball drifted further and further and further and then dropped, hitting the pitch well outside leg stump before turning at a brutal, impossible angle . . . Never, in all of cricket’s history, has one delivery had such a devastating impact. The game can even be said to be split in two, either side of that moment. After Shane Warne’s Ball of the Century, at Old Trafford on 4 June 1993, everything was changed. That burst of superior magic would haunt English cricket for the rest of the decade, as well as transforming the nature of the game – resurrecting the art of leg spin, and plaguing batsmen’s dreams. Ball of the Century is the story of cricket’s most famous delivery, and the explosive power of its legacy. England would go on to lose every Ashes series that decade; by the summer of 1999, they were rated as the worst team in the world. It was only as a new century dawned that a brighter era began to surface, with the struggles of one decade spawning the redemption of the next. In this ride through nineties Britain, Ashes cricket, leg spin bowling, and the rise of a legend, Ball of the Century explores how a single moment really can shape history.
