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SPORTS: CRICKET
PROFILE: MUTTIAH MURALITHARAN
Mystery Turner
Sri Lanka's matchwinner is the most feared slow bowler
in world cricket and is set to become the greatest of his generation
To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
The dirge of the
defeated Indian cricket team could have been borrowed from this 1960s
Byrds' classic. The tour of Sri Lanka was all about turn-the turn of the
tide and the turning of Indian backs on opportunity. And then, of course,
his turn, the likes of which they say they have never seen before. "He
can turn it on this," says Mohammed Kaif. "He can turn it on
this," says Harbhajan Singh, who knows a few things about turn himself.
He is Muttiah Muralitharan and "this" is the smooth, high-gloss
marbled floor of a five-star hotel.
It is as extreme a case as the Indians will
make to explain the statistic against Muralitharan's name at the end of
the Test series: 23 wickets of which 11 came on the best batting surface
of the lot. The reason? Not just that lethal and often improbable turn
but also the Kandy man's ability to find the batsman's jugular-in bat
and brain -and press down on it. At 29, the off-spinner is Sri Lanka's
most experienced cricketer, an Alfa-Romeo driving icon of Lankan unity,
the troubled island's most beloved Tamil.
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THE STATS FORETELL
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He is only 29, has 340 wickets from 65 Tests.
# Vs India he took a wicket every 47 balls.
# His overall strike-rate is 5.2 wickets
per Test.
# At that rate he could hit 500 wkts in
97 Tests.
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"It's easy being a bowler," Murali
laughingly told India Today. "You make a mistake, you have another
chance. Against me, batsmen only have one chance. One mistake and that's
the end." That guileless smile is a smokescreen. Coach Dav Whatmore
describes Murali as "highly strung" and there's a ruthless intelligence
at work. One of four sons of a well-to-do family which ran a confectionery
business in Kandy, Murali was sent to a boarding school from age five
and then gently advised by coach Sunil Fernando to give up bowling fast
and take to spin.
It is a rare breed of spin and it's all in that
wrist. Harbhajan and conventional off-spinners use the traditional off-spinner's
action-often described as the one we use with our fingers to turn a doorknob.
Murali instead uses his incredibly flexible wrist-which looks like it
is made of ball bearings rather than bones-to impart spin on the ball
like the leg-spinners do. In action, he is more like leg-spinner Shane
Warne except with a different stock ball-the off-break that turns from
off stump to leg unlike Warne's leg-break that turns the other way. When
Allan Border played Murali for the first time, he thought he was facing
an unorthodox leg-spinner. Steve Waugh said that batting against him was
"like being part of a David Copperfield show with reality and illusion
being closely intertwined". As if it wasn't bad enough Sri Lankan
wicketkeeper Kumar Sangakkara told India Today, "He's got another
mystery ball he's been working on." Sangakkara, studying to be a
lawyer, had to bat for hours in the nets against Murali so that he could
"pick" him from out of the hand and so be able to keep wickets
comfortably. As compared to the great off-spinners, only Englishman Jim
Laker has a better average and strike rate. Murali has taken five wickets
in an innings more times than Laker, Lance Gibbs, E.A.S. Prasanna and
Saqlain Mushtaq and his closest slow-bowling contemporary Warne.Then there
is the whole Murali side-show: the sheer effort in his bowling shows and
it's not just those bulging eyeballs, a theatre class all on their own.
They are still nothing compared to the strain he puts on his body. In
a nine-year-career Murali has injured his back, groin and knees. He has
suffered from a stress fracture of the ribs that team physio Alex Kontouri
says is an overuse injury found more commonly in elite rowers. In Colombo
he bowled with a stiff neck, 34 overs on the trot in one innings and 47
in the second.
Kontouri believes Murali's wrist is strong because
it has compensated (as the human body does) for his "bent" arm.
The arm had caused two umpires to calling him for "chucking"
but Sri Lanka stood behind him. His action was put through video analysis
and it was proved that due to a birth defect Murali could not straighten
his arm and so his action was deemed legal. It was an incident that showed
the world Sri Lanka had teeth and made Murali a stronger man.
The Indians struggled against his experience
and his craft. Before being a pounder of phrases, Navjot Sidhu had opened
for India and punished Murali. Sidhu's way: to advance down the wicket,
throw him off his length and try to get him to bowl shorter. He says a
right-hander must leave the crease at Murali's "point of no return",
the instant before the ball leaves his hand, not a second sooner or later.
Opener Sadagopan Ramesh said he thought positive batting and a solid defence
could help. Then he got it: what they're already calling "the ball
of the century"-bowled from around the wicket, wide of the crease
to the left-hander, that floated onto the leg stump, turned and crashed
into his offstump. Murali smiles. The Indians are right. "I can turn
it on anything."
—Sharda Ugra
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