When the little bloke with the wide, staring eyes takes the field at the Wanderers this weekend — the first Test starts on Friday — he will have 430 wickets in 76 Test matches already chalked up against his name.
Allowing that Shane Warne has 477 wickets and five Tests against England, you’d be daft to bet against Muttiah Muralitharan becoming the third bowler — after Courtney Walsh — to reach 500 Test wickets.
Equally, your money would almost certainly be safe if you wagered it on Muralitharan becoming Test cricket’s leading wicket-taker before the end of his career.
While we’re on the numbers, it seems opportune to point out that 70 of his wickets have come in 10 Tests against South Africa, 42 in six Tests in Sri Lanka and the remaining 28 in four Tests on South African soil. Eleven of these were claimed at Kingsmead two years ago with six coming in the South African second innings as the home side sought quick runs after the loss of the fourth day’s play to rain.
In the first innings, Muralitharan took 5/122 in 58.3 overs. The South African view, as expressed by Gary Kirsten, was that they expected Muralitharan to pick up wickets if he bowled enough overs, the logic seeming to be that they wanted to increase the ratio of overs to wickets to a point they regarded as acceptable.
Of course, you have to look at this equation from the fielding captain’s point of view. If you were offered 40 or 50 or 60 overs an innings for four, five or six wickets, you’d take this without thinking and concentrate on what the rest of the attack is going to do at the other end.
It goes without saying that Muralitharan is more effective on his home wickets. This is true of almost all bowlers and more particularly of spinners. But it’s worth recalling that his most devastating performance came against England at the Oval in 1998 when he took 16/220 to bowl Sri Lanka to a famous victory. And before you start disparaging the quality of the opposition, this was an England team fresh off a series victory against South Africa.
There can be little doubt that Muralitharan is one of the greatest bowlers to have played the game. Just as Warne reinvented the art of leg spin, Muralitharan mounted a persuasive argument for finger spin. In his wake have come Saqlain Mushtaq and Harbhajan Singh and between the two of them, Warne and Muralitharan have played significant roles in the revival of Test match cricket.
Perhaps more importantly, as far as Sri Lanka are concerned, Muralitharan gave one of Test cricket’s relative newcomers the means by which to win. While the contributions of batsmen like Arjuna Ranatunga, Aravinda de Silva and, more latterly, Sanath Jayasuriya should not be underestimated, Muralitharan gave his country the ability to bowl opposition teams out.
So, then, what about that action? On first viewing — and Muralitharan first toured this country with a Sri Lankan junior team in the early 1990s — it looks not so much suspicious as flat out guilty. On two different tours to Australia he was called for throwing, but after being poked and prodded and probed by a variety of experts, the International Cricket Council (ICC) cleared his actions. In layman’s terms, his elbow, which is congenitally bent, does not straighten in delivery.
Instead, Muralitharan’s magic comes from perhaps the most flexible wrist in cricket. His parlour trick, if you ask him nicely, is to bend his right hand backwards to the point where his knuckles brush his forearm. Don’t try this at home without adult supervision.
If you watch him closely, his wrist snaps through in delivery, varying its angle to produce the off-break, the top-spinner and the floater (the one that seems to go the other way) rather as an expert frisbee thrower uses his wrist to change the angle of flight of the frisbee.
It seems legal to me, and in any case, the ICC says it is, so the argument pretty much stops there. But there is more to Muralitharan than the revolutions and fizz he puts on the ball. He also possesses immaculate control of line and length, a shrewd mind and an intensely competitive nature. Throw all this into the wash and you have arguably the best off-spinner of all time.
He can, though, be countered. In the first Test in Galle two years ago, Daryll Cullinan adopted a guard around off stump and played Muralitharan with the spin. At the same time, the likes of Jonty Rhodes and Mark Boucher were getting themselves out, bowled trying to play against the turn.
Albeit in a losing cause, Cullinan constructed a century that demonstrated a method of dealing with Muralitharan’s stock ball, the sharply spinning off-break. If you get your pads far enough over, you’re unlikely to be either bowled or trapped leg before. And if you’re confident enough to play the slog-sweep, as young Davy Jacobs did last weekend, you can score runs.
Muralitharan will be a factor in this series because he’s a great bowler. At the same time, Sri Lanka have more or less acknowledged that they won’t be playing much Test cricket on raging turners by packing their squad with seamers.
Even so, in a fourth innings on the fourth or fifth day and on a wearing pitch, Muralitharan will be a handful. There’s no Cullinan to knock off another century and the younger South Africans, particularly the left-handers, Ashwell Prince and Graeme Smith, will have to work out a method pretty quickly.