Twenty20 Finals Day: Mason Crane the pupil ready to meet leg-spin master

The TV box set is every young sportsman’s must-have travel companion – but as Mason Crane makes his way to Edgbaston for Twenty20 Finals Day on Saturday, he has more reason than most to be thankful for their existence.

The 18-year-old leg-spinner has been instrumental in helping Hampshire to the last four of the competition for the sixth time in a row and has been granted an audience with the greatest leggie of them all before the summer is out.

By his own admission, Crane was expecting little more than a summer of second XI cricket following a spring of frantic A-level revision. Now, he has not only taken his maiden five-wicket haul in the County Championship but also emerged as one of the standout bowlers in this season’s T20 Blast.

His rise has not gone unnoticed by Shane Warne, who is set to pay a visit to his former county to pass on some pearls of leg-spin wisdom in the coming weeks. If nerves don’t get the better of the teenager, he might be tempted to tell the Australian of the unwitting role he played in encouraging him to attempt to master cricket’s toughest art.

“When I first started bowling, it was just the way the ball came out of my hand and so that’s what I’ve always done,” Crane tells The Independent. “I got the box set from the 2005 Ashes series and really enjoyed it. I got inspiration from Warne [who took 40 wickets for 19 as England won back the Ashes] in that series and I just stuck with it.

“Everyone knows when you play younger age-group cricket that there can be some outrageous figures – particularly when you’re bowling leg-spin, which young cricketers hardly ever come up against. I took 8 for 11 in a school game once. The year before I took 7 for 2 in another.”

Some pundits, most notably the hero of Edgbaston in 2005, Steve Harmison, have already called for Crane to be handed a role as a back-up spinner for the series against Pakistan this winter. Ian Salisbury, one of just a handful of English post-war leg-spinners told The Independent earlier in the summer, that Crane was a “gem”.

Hampshire, it seems, have a diamond on their hands. But while his stock continues to rise, Crane insists that he is merely focusing on the jewel in the domestic T20 crown as the season draws to a close.

“I really enjoy the Twenty20s because the batsmen are going at you so hard that you know you can pick up a wicket at any time,” he says. “Everything moves at 100 miles an hour. It’s brilliant, it’s great fun and when the crowd get going it’s a fantastic spectacle. We’ve played some great T20 cricket this year and, hopefully, we can bring it home at Edgbaston.

“As for the long term, it’s amazing to be spoken about by people who have played international cricket, but I think it would be unbelievably unlikely for me to be picked. It would really be an out-of-the-box selection. I think it’s important that people remember I’m only 18 and I’ve only played two first-class games so far. It’s amazing that some people are thinking that already.”

In reality, Crane is extremely unlikely to be heading out to the UAE in the coming months, unless he fancies some winter sun after a pretty damp finish to the summer – but if he does meet Warne in the meantime then what would he say to one of the most gifted players in history?

“I really don’t know – I’ve got no idea,” Crane admits. “I would probably ask a few questions and then see how it goes, to be honest. Having that sort of guy in the room would obviously be massively beneficial. It would be unbelievable if it did happen.

“He made leg-spin look so easy but really he has just made it harder for the rest of us.”

Meeting Warne, it seems, might be the only thing that has fazed Crane all season.