TERRY JENNER will be remembered first as Shane Warne's coach, but he devoted much of his life to helping young spin bowlers who could never be as good as him.

''The tragedy,'' he told me once, ''is that Shane was so good in the sense of control - line, length and spin - that expectations of what a leg-spinner is have grown and no one can live up to it. The sad part about the legacy is that either people won't let kids bowl the way he bowls, or when they do, people want them to be very accurate, dot-ball bowlers, and the only way young people can do that is by sacrificing spin. I've been going down this road for the last 10 years, but suddenly someone might pay some attention.''

Jenner died yesterday, aged 66, more than a year after having a heart attack while in England to conduct a series of coaching clinics.

Jenner played nine Tests for Australia before spending 18 months in prison in 1988 for stealing money from his employer to pay gambling debts. Jenner credited his partnership with Warne as allowing him to turn his life around. ''Working with Shane changed everything,'' Jenner said in 2010. The feeling was mutual, as Warne showed last night when he tweeted: ''So much to say about the great man - we all owe TJ so much. My sympathy to all his family - the great man will be missed - RIP''.

Last November, with his heart pumping at about 15 per cent capacity, Jenner turned up at Glenelg Oval for a net session with Cullen Bailey, the leggie who that week had been left out of the South Australian team to play England in a tour match. He was upset that Bailey's confidence had been knocked around, not for the first time since he was awarded a Cricket Australia contract and saddled with the unrealistic expectations that came with it, and that he had been told to dart his leg breaks through the air too quickly.

Jenner did a nice line in exasperation, not with the spinners themselves but with those who failed to understand why they couldn't all be like his most famous pupil. He expressed his exasperation regularly, with the selectors who sent spinner after spinner through a revolving door to the Test team, with the states who wouldn't pick them, with the captains and coaches who wanted to turn them into robots. He spoke about the subtleties of spin bowling, a little-understood craft, of how young spinners had to be nurtured, and given the time to learn to defend themselves in first-class cricket before they could be fed to the wolves in a Test match. He wanted no part for developing spinners in Twenty20. ''You may as well roll out a bowling machine,'' he growled.