1,000 not out -- this is a score achieved by Shane Warne as far as sleeping with women is concerned!
Suggestions that Test cricket's highest wicket-taker has taken 1,000 women to bed but caught only five times, threaten once again to shift public focus from his on-field exploits to those off it.
The scandalous revelations appear in an unauthorised biography by journalist Paul Barry titled 'Spun Out'.
It is believed Barry hired an investigator to dig into the spinner's private life for the book.
"One of Shane's mates at Channel Nine told me that he reckoned Warne had probably had 1,000 women and only got caught five times," Barry says in the book, which was serialised across some Australian newspapers starting today.
"I thought at the time this was a crazy exaggeration. But now I'm not so sure.
I personally know two other women who have been propositioned (or more) by him, and my limited knowledge of statistics says there must be a host of others with similar stories."
Barry's book is replete with sex-anecdotes about Warne, including the story of him being thrown out of the cricket academy for asking three young women for sex by a Darwin pool in a chapter suggestively titled 'Suck on this'.
However, people close to Warne said the version of the story was not completely accurate.
Warne's brother and manager Jason said yesterday he did not think there would be much new in the book.
"If people want to know the truth they had better wait to see what Shane says when he writes his," Jason said.