Those Victorian teams with Warne and Howard featured a two-pronged leg-spin attack with Howard also bowling leggies before later switching to off-spin.

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Warne, 52, died in a Thailand villa on Friday while on holiday of a suspected heart attack, with his management confirming he was found unresponsive and unable to be revived.

"Looking back now, I was extremely fortunate... because I was a leg-spinner and he was a leg-spinner I roomed with him each time we went away and they were just incredible experiences," Howard said on Saturday.

"Getting to know him as a person was certainly a lot different to what you see on TV and I just look back today and think how fortunate I was to be able to get to know him as a human being and not just a cricketer."

Howard described Warne as a genuis of what has long been regarded as the most difficult bowling craft to master - leg-spin.

"It was his strength of mind and competitive will that set him apart from anyone else," said Howard, who played 16 first-class games for Victoria and also held the position of Cricket Australia's spin-bowling pathways coach before the pandemic.

"If you put him and Stuart MacGill (former Australian leg-spinner) side-by-side to see who spun it the most, MacGill might have spun it more, but it was Warnie's ability to control his mind and execute his skill that, again, set him apart.

"He was such a competitive beast that he was able to create more than what was actually happening on the ball as well, which is saying something about his skill.

"He had such a will to win and a lack of fear of failure and that was off the back of a lot of hard work, which I saw some of first-hand in terms of the volume of work he did at a younger age and that he put in with TJ (Terry Jenner).

"Technically, he was very well set-up with a very simple action and just enormous power in which he was able to create enormous force from that very simple action, which helped his consistency.

"He was a beast of an athlete underneath that bit of puppy fat."

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Howard says Australian cricket has lost a wealth of wisdom and experience with the deaths on the same day of Warne and Marsh, who was running the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide during Howard's year in the program in the early '90s.

"There's so many good memories of the times we had in Adelaide and how Rod moulded us and shaped us as people and years after you'd see him and he'd still have a real genuine care in how you were going," Howard said.

"It's an incredibly sad time because Shane and Rod had so much knowledge that is no longer with us. I am very fortunate to have been able to spend time with both."

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Meanwhile, former Bendigo United star batsman Matt Pinniger recalls his handful of games during the late '90s playing against Warne in Melbourne's Premier Cricket competition.

Pinniger - an opening batsman - was playing for Melbourne and Warne for St Kilda.

"I remember asking coach at the time Michael Sholly, 'what do I do here', when it came to facing Warnie," Pinniger said.

"Michael's advice was, well, he's the world's best bowler and he's going to get you out anyway, so you might as well get down the wicket and try to hit him for six.

"But I wasn't doing that against the world's best bowler... he was a person who had an absolute vibe about him all the time.

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"Whenever he walked into a room it was just like there was a beacon of light shining above him all the time. He was a ripping bloke, not arrogant at all, just a genuine person.

"He was always really generous with his time."

Pinniger also remembers one Melbourne v St Kilda game he played in where Warne had a major impact with the bat in cracking a century.

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