"If you play sport, you want to try yourself against the best, and he was the best" © Getty Images

Shane Warne: if you are going to pick a spinner, then you have to include Warne. He revolutionised the game of legspin. There had been a lot of good players who bowled legspin before him; the reason I think he was unique was because he came on the scene and he spun the ball alarmingly - enormous amounts of spin. Now there have been other other legspinners in the history of the game who bowled balls with quite a lot of spin, but usually they kept bowling the odd long hop or half volley in between the good balls.

Warne has such great accuracy; he could bowl so accurately that he hardly ever gave you a bad ball. So allied to that great spin, supreme accuracy, he could bowl the googly, and then his flipper was the magic ball, as well as his topspinner - four variations. There is a lot of kidology used, saying he'd got this sort of ball and that ball, but really there is only about four deliveries - legspin, googly, topspinner and the flipper. When he had his shoulder injury, yes he couldn't bowl the flipper or the googly so easily, but until he had shoulder trouble he could do them all absolutely brilliantly.

For someone like me, watching him... I would have loved to have had a bat against him. Not because I think I would have been successful or I think I'd have failed, it's just that I would have loved to have the challenge. I don't remember anybody, in my time of playing or my 20 years of commentating, anybody who has been remotely like him or as good. Somebody that good who has performed all over the world - most places in the world he has done great - you would just like to pit your skills, and your wits against him to see how you would come out. It's a challenge. If you play sport, you want to try yourself against the best, and he was the best.

Allied to that, he had such an ebullient character. He could lift people in the team. Great competitor. Probably the one small thing, minus against him - I checked that when he came to India and played nine matches, he took 34 wickets and they cost him 43 runs each. Most people don't realise that he wasn't a great success in India. It's one thing that I think he would probably like to go back and change if he could, because 43 runs per wicket is very, very expensive. But then again, the Indians are pretty good batsmen against spin, aren't they? And they have had some very good players at the time Warne was playing.