An injury to the bowling shoulder of Sri Lanka’s record-breaking off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan wasn’t as bad as first feared and an operation to fix it was a success, his surgeon told Australia’s national broadcaster on Tuesday.
Muralitharan will likely be sidelined for five months, but he should regain full use of his shoulder, orthopedic surgeon David Young told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Late on Monday, Young operated on the Sri Lankan cricketing hero to treat a lesion that had caused a build-up of fluid around the nerves in his right shoulder.
Young said he thought the injury would be more severe.
”I was pleasantly surprised,” he said. ”He’s a 32-year-old who’s been playing international cricket for 12 years. I thought there would be a fair bit of wear and tear on the shoulder. We didn’t find that, we found a lesion and that in turn was pressing on a nerve and starting to weaken the muscle and that was our real concern.”
Muralitharan now looks certain to miss Sri Lanka’s scheduled tours of Bangladesh in November and New Zealand in December. That means he will likely surrender his title as Test cricket’s leading wicket taker to Australian leg spinner Shane Warne.
Warne has 527 Test scalps — just five behind Muralitharan’s 532 — but should play in four Tests in India and five home Tests against New Zealand and Pakistan before Muralitharan is expected to be fit to play again.
Warne drew level with Muralitharan as the world’s top wicket-taker last month but has never held the honour outright. — Sapa-AP