Muttiah Muralitharan: The wizard of Sri Lanka

On March 13 1996, India played their last World Cup match at home. It was a disaster. Their opponents Sri Lanka were handed the match by default after crowd behaviour made it difficult for play to continue. India kept slipping behind the run rate while their wicket rate increased. It had been a sweltering day, and hugely uncomfortable in the stands; water ran out and so did the official drink. Frustration piled up. When match referee Clive Lloyd called off the game, India were 120 for eight chasing 250.

Fifteen years later, two players from that match, both April-born, will be seen in action again. Sachin Tendulkar was not yet 23, Muttiah Muralitharan not yet 24. Since that March, Tendulkar has made 40 centuries to be acknowledged as the finest one-day batsman the game has seen, with more runs and more centuries than anybody else. His countrymen hope that he makes the tournament starting in February his own. If India win, Tendulkar will have no more worlds to conquer.

Muralitharan, if anything, has had an even greater impact on his team’s successes in the two older forms of the game. He has since taken 474 wickets to emerge as one of only two bowlers with over 500 wickets (Wasim Akram is the other, he has 15 wickets fewer than Murali’s 517).

Yet, the most successful bowler in one-day cricket will not be feeling half the pressure that is being heaped upon the most successful batsman. For one, Muralitharan is not expected to run through sides every time he gets a ball in hand. He played just five matches last year, to claim five wickets. For another, there are no landmarks beckoning; at the very least Sachin is expected to complete a hundred international centuries. No matter that no one has scored three centuries in a single World Cup before.

The focus on Tendulkar has meant that there has not been as much attention on other players, certainly not yet. And while the Indian is enjoying a rare Second Coming, the Sri Lankan has announced that he will play no more international cricket after the World Cup. A giant of the game is thus preparing to bid goodbye, and cricket fans in the country ought not to be so blinded by the chances of India winning or Tendulkar scoring to ignore Muralitharan.

I think it can be safely said that there will be no bowler like him again. For that would mean a set of unconnected circumstances coming together for a second time.

Muralitharan became the first wrist-spinning off spinner thanks to an anatomical accident. He has an eleven-degree congenital deformity of his right arm, and in his own evocative words, “helicopter wrists” that can make the ball do strange and wonderful things. What might have been a handicap was turned into an advantage. But of course it is not enough to have helicopter wrists. You need to have a large heart too and enjoy a good fight.

The back of Murali’s palm faces the batsman when he bowls the doosra, a delivery that could not have been bowled with a fair action under the old law. Yet if Murali has been able to expand the horizons of his craft, it has as much to do with his ability to bowl the doosra legally (under the current law) as his persistence in the face of criticism. The result has been a skill that has enriched the game. It will take a generation or two to give him his due as the greatest offspinner to have played the game — greater than Jim Laker, Lance Gibbs or Erapally Prasanna. For now he is too close to us, and too close to the controversy over his action for such deification.

Murali remains the only offie to combine the two styles of spin bowling — finger spin and wrist spin. Only one left arm spinner has combined the two at the highest level, the incredible Garry Sobers. But he didn’t attempt the doosra, a delivery whose existence like that of the planet Neptune, was predicted in theory, but had yet to be developed in his time.

It has always been easier to understand Murali the man - charming, committed to the cause of the less privileged - than to understand Murali the bowler.

He might not have played in the tournament if it had been held elsewhere. A chance to bow out at home —  like he did in Test cricket after his 800th wicket — was too good to miss.  Cricket lovers must rejoice that this is so. The great man deserves a fitting farewell.

—The writer is an author and columnist who has written on Indian sports for over a quarter century