Muralitharan, a true sporting great

Yesterday, with a global audience of millions holding their breath, his Test career ended with a climax that even Bollywood would not have dared dream up.

With the final ball of his final match, Muralitharan became the first player in history to take 800 Test wickets. If sport is all about timing, you’d struggle to come up with better than that.

The statistics – 800 wickets in 133 Tests at an average of 22.72 – are staggering, yet the Sri Lankan’s achievements will not be met with universal acclaim. For every person wanting to laud him, there is another desperate to decry him as a fake.

Let’s deal with the critics first. Perhaps the politest way to address Muralitharan’s bowling action is to describe it as questionable. Others would no doubt go much further.

The off-spinner was born with a congenital deformity of the elbow, which prevents him from straightening his arm. The bent elbow, combined with incredibly supple wrists and an abnormal shoulder rotation, makes it appear as though Muralitharan is contravening the law that governs what is a fair delivery.

When a bowler’s arm reaches the level of the shoulder during delivery, the elbow joint must not straighten until the ball leaves the hand. If it does, the bowler is deemed to be throwing the ball rather than bowling it.

Two Australian umpires, Darrell Hair and Ross Emerson, charged Muralitharan with throwing, sparking an ICC investigation that proved that all bowlers straighten their arm to a varying degree. An acceptable limit was set, and Muralitharan fell within it.

Yet the criticism continued, particularly when the spinner developed a ‘doosra’ (an off-spinner’s googly) that appeared to contravene the rules more clearly than ever. Again, however, Muralitharan was exonerated, with the excess turn attributed to the super-rotation of his wrist.

Every time he has been tested, he has satisfied the ICC’s demands. And all the while he has continued to claim Test-match wickets at an unprecedented rate. As former England captain Michael Atherton said yesterday, ‘Even if you think he is a chucker, you must admit he has been a bloody great one’.

In conjunction with his great Australian rival, Shane Warne, he has certainly transformed the landscape of Test cricket.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and largely thanks to the dominance of the West Indies, it was widely assumed that spinning was a dying art.

Test attacks had to be quick, uncompromising and aggressive.

Muralitharan proved that an off-spinner could still be a match winner despite the introduction of covered pitches and a leg-before law that protected batsmen against conventional off spin.

True, he turned the ball in a way nobody had ever seen before. But he enabled others to attempt to emulate him and sparked a revival of the spinner’s art.

For that, the whole of world cricket should be thankful. Yet when it comes to assessing Muralitharan’s legacy, a more parochial viewpoint should be adopted. If Murali is loved and respected in the rest of the world, in his native Sri Lanka he is revered as a God.

On the cricket field, he led Sri Lanka’s transformation from a second-rate nation into a fully-fledged member of the Test ranks and world champion in the one-day game.

Away from the wicket, his impact was even more pronounced. As a member of the Tamil community, in a country in which Tamils continue to be persecuted, Muralitharan has been one of the few unifying factors in a bitterly-divided land.

As a child, he watched his father’s biscuit factory burn to the ground after it was attacked by a mob of Sinhalese youths, an incident that left his father badly injured. Yet he has spent his career attempting to build bridges between the communities and has proved that Tamils can hold a place at the very top of Sri Lankan society.

He has also poured time and money into his homeland, particularly in the wake of the devastating tsunami that decimated Sri Lanka in 2004.

With 40,000 Sri Lankans having perished, Muralitharan harried aid agencies into releasing supplies and personally drove them into Galle, the seaside town that was one of the worst-affected areas following the Boxing Day disaster, and where, by dint of happy coincidence, he claimed his final wicket yesterday.

He has subsequently funded the rebuilding of more than 1,000 houses in 24 different villages and has established the Mankulam project, a charitable organisation that is attempting to alleviate poverty in Sri Lanka’s impoverished north.

While other sportsmen adopt charitable causes as a statement of fashion, Muralitharan has used his own fame and success to change thousands of his compatriots’ lives.

For that, as much as the 800 wickets that will forever be etched in the record books, he deserved to be remembered as a true sporting great.