Just before noon at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, history stood poised at the top of Shane Warne’s run-up. At the crease, Devon Malcolm, England’s hapless tail-ender, shuffled into position, unwittingly about to become the final brushstroke in a masterpiece. Warne, already a magician in the making, had woven his spell over successive deliveries. One more wicket and the leg-spinning alchemist would seize one of cricket’s rarest accolades—a Test hat-trick.
It was Damien Fleming, Warne’s teammate and fellow Victorian, who offered the simplest of counsel: close your eyes and bowl your stock ball. It was a bowler’s equivalent of instinct—muscle memory over calculation, faith over doubt. Warne obliged.
Malcolm, a batsman more known for his vulnerability than his virtuosity, lunged forward uncertainly. The ball kissed his pad, then his glove, before veering sharply off its trajectory. The arc was preordained. At short leg, David Boon, the rugged Tasmanian, dived to his right, snatching the ball in a single, emphatic motion. For a man who so often wore the visage of a grizzled enforcer, Boon’s celebration was almost poetic—ball flung skyward as if sending Warne’s name into the heavens alongside it.
Warne sprinted towards his jubilant teammates. “I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast,” he later confessed, perhaps still grappling with the magnitude of his feat. After all, no bowler had taken an Ashes hat-trick since Hugh Trumble—91 long years before Warne had ever turned a ball on his backyard pitch in Victoria.
Soon after, England crumbled to 92 all out, its lowest Ashes total in 36 years. Australia’s margin of victory—295 runs—was as emphatic as its dominance in the series, now 2-0 in the hosts’ favor. And yet, amidst the wreckage of England’s innings, the moment that endured belonged to Warne.
The Hat-Trick as Destiny
Test hat-tricks are freakish phenomena—rare and unplanned, almost cosmic in their orchestration. There had been only 20 in the history of the game before Warne’s, some separated by mere hours, others by decades. Australia itself had seen two in recent memory: Merv Hughes in 1988 and Damien Fleming just months prior in Rawalpindi. Yet Warne’s was different. It was an event imbued with inevitability, as though the cricketing gods themselves had scripted it.
Standing at the top of his mark, Warne turned to Fleming. “I asked ‘Flemo’ what he had done, and he said, ‘I just closed my eyes and bowled my stock out-swinger.’” Warne grinned. “So I closed my eyes and bowled my stock ball.”
At the other end, England’s captain Mark Taylor orchestrated the theatre, drawing his fielders in—a human noose around Malcolm. The leg-spinner fizzed in. The edge was faint but sufficient. The catch, spectacular but certain. For a moment, silence. Then, Steve Randell, the umpire, raised his finger, and the roar of the MCG swallowed all else.
Warne had become only the sixth Australian to claim a Test hat-trick, the first in an Ashes contest for nearly a century. He himself seemed to struggle with the surrealism of it all. “I suppose I’ll wake up soon,” he mused, as if afraid the illusion would break. “All you can do is go out and do your best. If you get wickets, you get wickets. If you don’t, as long as you win.”
And win they did. Moments later, the last English wicket fell. The scoreboard painted a picture of devastation—four ducks among England’s final four batsmen. The last of them, Phil Tufnell, edged Craig McDermott behind to Ian Healy, ending the match with a whisper rather than a fight.
The Shadow of McDermott
As the Australians left the field, Warne carried with him a souvenir stump, pausing only to shake the left hand of England’s wounded but defiant Alec Stewart, who had resisted longer with one good hand than most of his teammates had with two.
Yet, in the glow of Warne’s triumph, another figure lingered in the periphery—Craig McDermott. The blond fast bowler had been Australia’s spearhead, taking five wickets in the innings and eight in the match. It was his relentless hostility that had reduced England to rubble, his accuracy that had drawn the edge, the error, the fatal misjudgment. And yet, in the theatre of the day, he had been cast as a mere supporting act.
McDermott, whose career had teetered at the crossroads not long ago, had every right to bask in his own redemption. But he knew the narrative had shifted. When Warne, ever self-deprecating, remarked that he had merely “chipped in” for a couple of wickets, McDermott smirked. “Only three, mate,” he muttered. But he was smiling.
For all his efforts, McDermott understood the immutable truth of that afternoon: it was Warne’s world. The rest of them were merely playing in it.
Thank You
Faisal Caesar
