IN THE aftermath of his untimely passing, Shane Warne’s life as a leg spinner par excellence has quite rightly been lauded — and with it is his brief tenure as a St Kilda footballer at under-19 and reserve grade level.

In truth, Warne kicked the dew off the ground but once in a curtain raiser – the 15th round match at Moorabbin on Saturday, July 9, 1988 – and his direct opponent in that one was Milham Hanna of the Col Kinnear-coached Carlton team.

This week Hanna, a member of the Blues’ last Premiership team of 1995, remembered with affection the time he went head-to-head with the Saints’ SK Warne at the old Linton Street ground.

“I ended Shane Warne’s football career . . . I burnt him off his feet,” Hanna dryly suggested.

“I remember this kid with bleached blond hair, but to be honest I didn’t know who he was . . . it wasn’t until years later that I finally realised.”

The St Kilda historian Russell Holmesby recently wrote that Warne’s solitary reserve grade appearance coincided with the return of St Kilda champion the late Trevor Barker after a 14-week layoff with a heel injury. Holmesby also noted that The Football Record had mistakenly recorded St Kilda’s No.60 as one “Trevor” Warne and by the time the error was rectified the player was back in the thirds and by early ’89 out the door.

Remarkably, Warne hadn’t expected to take the field at all for that wintry Saturday arvo in ‘88. Bed-ridden with the flu all week, he’d intended to phone the club’s reserve grade coach Gary Colling to declare himself unavailable – but was instead called by Colling who told him he’d be a starter for the reserves, an opportunity the kid from Mentone Grammar couldn’t pass up.

Hanna, meanwhile, had overcome the bitter disappointment of rupturing the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee in the early minutes of his first senior match for Carlton in the opening round of 1986, and was quite literally trying to find his feet at senior level.

“I missed all of 1986, came back from injury in ’87 and played the first eight or nine games before I got dropped,” Hanna said. “I managed 16 games in ’88 and can only guess I was coming back from injury or had been dropped (the record books reveal the latter) when I played in that game at Moorabbin.”

Hanna’s senior League tenure would ultimately endure for 190 matches through 12 seasons at Carlton, while Warne’s future career in the creams would know no bounds.

Along the way, their paths would again cross, although the reserve grade contest comfortably won by St Kilda was never discussed. As Hanna recalled: “I met up with ‘Warnie’ a few times, mainly through ‘Sammy’ (Aaron) Hamill, who was a great mate of his, but I never brought the game up with him”.

“At the end of the day I towelled him, but imagine what might have been if he’d played well?,” Hanna said. “I reckon I did the world of cricket a favour.”