Mourning rituals are about sharing,and more could be shared about Shane Warne than about any Australian. For better and worse,one of his great gifts was to leave millions feeling that they truly knew him,and their loss was as of a friend.

Inevitably,the more official the statement,the more distant the speaker,the more hyperbolic. The Prime Minister,Scott Morrison,said Warne “was loved by all”. In the face of mortality,who would not want something like that said about them?

Conversely,the blanketing grief imposed its protocols. In India,cricket great Sunil Gavaskar remarked that Warne’s cricket record on the subcontinent had been inferior to other spin bowlers. The pile-on was savage and immediate for Gavaskar,who had past form in speaking too bluntly,too soon. He promptly apologised.

Walking behind Warne through a cricket crowd,you saw how others projected their appetites onto him. He would be asked to stop to drink alcohol with strangers – they felt they knew him,though,as he told Leigh Sales in what the journalist called her “dream interview” three years ago,they did not. He was not the big drinker of his public persona,yet he did not want people to speak poorly of him,so he often obliged. With good grace,he earned a reputation for his generosity to fans:signing autographs,posing for selfies,small acts that ordinary people would remember and speak about,and have spoken about this week.

At the same time,he was only human. The most insightful tributes and commentary have come from his senior teammates who knew him best. Warne had a particularly strong respect for his elders,such as Allan Border,Mark Taylor,Ian Botham,Ian and Greg Chappell,Dennis Lillee,the late Terry Jenner and Rodney Marsh. The elders would offer a dose of circumspection.

Border referred to Warne’s need for reassurance from those elders. Taylor wrote,in reference to criticism of Warne’s television commentary,that he might have benefited from having people like Ian Chappell and Border around him to pull him into line.

“But you don’t always have to agree with someone to be good friends with them,” Taylor wrote. “My worry today is people are so quick to judge. That if you’re not for me,you’re against me. If we had lived our lives that way we would not have been mates.”

Kerry O’Keeffe,the former leg-spinner who grew close with Warne as a Fox Cricket commentator,spoke movingly of Warne’s restless search for “peace” and said he did not know if his friend had ever really found it. Warne never forgave his former captain Steve Waugh for dropping him from the Australian team in 1999. Waugh made a gracious and heartfelt statement after Warne’s death about the many happy memories they had shared.

“Don’t worry about the public persona,” Border said,“that’s just Warnie doing his thing.”

Not even Shane Warne could play the role of Shane Warne all day,every day. Walking through those crowds,sometimes he was in a hurry to meet an obligation. If he didn’t want to beShane Warne,he buried his face in his mobile phone,which he used as a shield. It was not rude,just necessary. Sometimes,in an elevator,if he wanted a break from beingShane Warne,he would pretend to be on his phone,even when there was no possibility of reception. Bradman,the only other Australian whose fame has ever equalled Warne’s,spent much of his life shutting it out. Warne mostly welcomed it. Publicity was a bountiful exchange. But when he wanted seclusion,his phone was his bodyguard.

Warne’s dying in a Thai resort on last Friday afternoon gave rise to a wave of admiring,chuckling fancy. “So rock and roll,” said the ABC’s Tony Armstrong. Reporters went to Koh Samui to investigate. There was a frisson when a flower-bearing blonde woman was allowed to spend 40 seconds with his body in its ambulance. It turned out that she was a German tourism executive. Authorities stated that Warne had died from natural causes.

On Friday afternoon,after lunch,Warne had visited a tailor and received a massage. The evidence was that in his last moments he was up to nothing more than phoning his children and watching cricket on TV. His friends and manager conducted themselves with dignity as they described no wild party,just prosaic natural causes,so “relatable” it will send a population of 52-year-olds to get a medical check-up. A common preventable death that saves the lives of others could be his most powerful legacy.

What more could possibly be said about Shane Warne? As the twentieth-century American theologian Thomas Merton said of a deity of his time and place,nothing can be said about him that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. About Warne,nothing can be said that wasn’t already said by the force of nature he was on the cricket field. No tribute can match the wall-to-wall replays of his performances as a cricketer.

He might have been only a cricketer – but what a cricketer he was. It is beguiling to watch the world’s best batsmen face him,terrified by a slow-moving ball which he could conjure to go past their bat,around or between their legs,behind their back,into their pad,or lure them to their doom by tempting them into panic,playing the shot they swore not to play.

He was a physical force that worked on the mind. If you had the slightest interest in cricket,you could watch Warne’s highlights forever. They leave a permanent afterglow of pleasure. He made the cricket ball talk,as they say;he made it shout and laugh and voice its opinions,he made it whisper and murmur and crack jokes and tell stories. When play got dull,he made it drone away without pausing for breath,and late at night he made it send text messages and Instagram posts. When it came out of Warne’s hand,the cricket ball said all that needs saying.

The grief will endure for those close to Shane Warne. The world can respectfully recede. In life he had,by all accounts,little desire to rest,and peace was fleeting. He can have both now.

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