The family of Warne, who died from a heart attack in Thailand last Friday (February 25), accepted the offer from Victoria Premier Dan Andrews for a state funeral, an honour only extended to figures of public significance, which will take place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG).

The MCG and the statue there of Warne has become a site for fans' tributes to the Melbourne-born and raised hero, with flowers, beer and photographs left in remembrance.

"There's nowhere in the world more appropriate to farewell Warnie than the 'G," wrote Andrews on Twitter.

Tickets to the service will be available to the public and it will be livestreamed for those unable to attend in person.

Warne was to cricket what Lionel Messi is to football, Usain Bolt to athletics and Roger Federer to tennis, a genius who redefined their sport.

How good was Warne? When Wisden chose its cricketers of the 20th century, Warne was one of the five chosen, despite having only made his Test debut in 1992, a player lifted onto the Parthenon ahead of his time having single-handedly revived the sport's most difficult art of leg-spin bowling which, until he came along, seemed to be on the verge of extinction as teams relied increasingly on fast bowling.

Warne took 708 wickets during his Test career, the second-best of all time, but that tells only half the story.

He had as many career lows as highs, taking money from illegal bookmakers, being banned after failing a drugs test and regularly appearing in the gossip-columns for his sexual indiscretions and social media faux pas. 

It never seemed to taint Warne’s legacy, however. He was the archetypal Aussie bloke who enjoyed a tinny, liked a cigarette and was good for a laugh. He had a god-given talent that put him onto a different stratosphere, yet everyone thought of him as their mate and a larrikin the Australian public identified with.

Warne’s career, though, was nearly strangled at birth after his debut at the age of 22. His first four innings in Tests returned one wicket for 335 runs, and the selectors seemed about to lose patience with the pineapple pizza-loving beach-blonde with the ear stud. Then he bowled three Sri Lankans in 31 balls to win a thriller in Colombo and he had lift off.

A match-winning 7-52 beat the then mighty West Indies, he took wickets against neighbours New Zealand, then the legend truly began with his first Test delivery in England in 1993: the "Ball of the Century" that drifted all the way across batsman Mike Gatting, pitched harmlessly outside his legs, but somehow ripped back to clip the top of off stump.

"That Ball", as it is also called, is so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page with a detailed scientific analysis of it. "First ball in an Ashes series… I felt pretty bloody good!" Warne said in Amazon’s documentary Shane which first aired back in January. "The Ball of the Century was a fluke. It really was. I never did it again in the first ball of any time. It really was a fluke, but I think it was meant to be."

A few years ago, I met Gatting at a mutual friend’s wedding, and asked him about it. The former England captain had long come to terms with the historic role he had played in one of cricket’s greatest moments. "It gave his career a bit of a launching pad, but the fact is he was a fantastic cricketer, fantastic for the game, fantastic for the kids he inspired and a very good friend," Gatting told me.

"That Ball", though, left a generation of English batsmen with a neurosis that haunted them whenever Warne was thrown the ball to bowl. "It didn’t matter whether you knew his leg-break from his googly, or his flipper, top-spinner, slider, or zooter for that matter … In fact, it meant you were in pretty good company, because the best batsmen of his generation couldn’t tell most of them apart either," Andy Bull wrote in The Guardian in his obituary of Warne.

Warne explained in the Amazon documentary two months ago about how he felt when he bowled. "Standing at the top of my mark with a ball in my hand and I looked down the pitch, it was my domain. I owned it," he said.

It was claimed that Warne got so inside the head of South Africa batsman Daryll Cullinan that he consulted a therapist about it. When the pair next met, Warne asked Cullinan about the colour of the couch.

On another occasion after returning to the side from a prolonged absence due to injury, Cullinan arrived at the wicket to be met by a drooling Warne who told him: "I’ve been waiting two years for the opportunity to humiliate you in front of your own crowd."

Quick as a flash, the South African replied: "Looks like you spent it eating."

Even as a kid Warne was chubby, and he fought a constant lifetime battle with his weight. Warne’s death reportedly followed a diet which involved taking only liquids for 14 days.

"It was a bit all or nothing," admitted his manager James Erskine. "It was either white buns with butter and lasagne stuffed in the middle, or he would be having black and green juices."

It was trying to lose weight that was behind one of the most embarrassing episodes in Warne’s career. In 2003, Warne was sent home from the World Cup in South Africa after testing positive for diuretics - a drug often used to help weight loss or as a masking agent for other drugs.

Warne claimed that he only took the substance to "look good on TV". He insisted that he had been given the tablet by his mum and had only taken because he did not want to look overweight during a television appearance prior to facing the camera to announce his retirement from one-day international cricket after that World Cup tournament.

Warne’s explanation did not impress Richard Pound, then the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency. "Poisoned by his mother? It is good, very good; it ranks up there with the one, 'I got it from the toilet seat,'" the Canadian lawyer told me when I rung him up and told him the reason Warne claimed to have tested positive.

The subsequent 12-month ban is one of the reasons that Warne never fulfilled his ambition to captain Australia in Test cricket. For most sportsmen, a positive drugs test would be a massive asterisk next to their name. But for Warne, it just seemed to add to the legend.

Asked by Amazon, how he would describe himself, Warne replied: "I like loud music, I smoked, I drank, I bowled a bit of leg spin. That’s me."