Muttiah Muralitharan: 800 Test wickets
An unusually flexible wrist and elbow, and an action questioned by umpires more than once, produced the most prolific bowler in Test history. Muttiah Muralitharan finished on exactly 800 wickets, reaching the mark in his very last Test, at Galle, in front of his home crowd.
Kandy, and a strange elbow
Muttiah Muralitharan grew up in Kandy, in Sri Lanka's central hill country, and was unusual among elite spin bowlers from the very start of his career: a congenital deformity of his right elbow meant it could not straighten fully, and an unusually flexible wrist let him generate spin and bounce that conventional off-spinners of the era could not match. He made his Test debut against Australia at the R. Premadasa Stadium in Colombo in 1992, taking 3 wickets, and by his mid-twenties he was already the leading bowler in a Sri Lankan side that was beginning to compete seriously with the game's established powers.
The no-ball calls
Muralitharan's action became the subject of one of the most prolonged controversies in modern cricket. He was called for throwing by the Australian umpire Darrell Hair during a Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in December 1995, and questioned again by other umpires in the years that followed, including during a one-day series in Australia in 1999. Biomechanical testing carried out by university laboratories subsequently found that his elbow's inability to straighten fully, along with the flexibility of his wrist, created an optical illusion of throwing even when his arm stayed within the degree of straightening later set as legal for all bowlers. The controversy shadowed a large part of his career even as his wicket-taking continued at a rate no spinner before him had sustained.
The International Cricket Council eventually adjusted the permitted degree of elbow straightening for all bowlers after research showed that even actions long considered clean involved more flex than had been assumed, a change that effectively settled the question in Muralitharan's favour while also reshaping how every bowler's action was assessed afterwards. He kept playing and kept taking wickets throughout the years the controversy ran, a level of consistency under public scrutiny that few bowlers in any sport have had to sustain for so long.
The Oval, 1998
One of his most complete performances came against England at the Kennington Oval in 1998, where he took 9 for 65 in the second innings and 16 wickets in the match, his best match bowling figures in the CricArcade archive, bowling Sri Lanka to victory in a match that was, for long periods, evenly poised. It remains one of the most one-man performances in Test history, a single bowler taking almost every wicket needed to force a result away from home against a strong batting line-up.
Kandy again, 2002
His best single-innings figures in the archive, 9 for 51, came against Zimbabwe at Asgiriya Stadium in Kandy in 2002, a ground close to where he grew up and his second-most productive venue by wickets in the whole archive, 117 wickets in 16 Tests, behind only the Sinhalese Sports Club Ground in Colombo, where he took 166 wickets in 24 Tests. It sits alongside 9 for 65 at the Oval, 8 for 46 against West Indies at Asgiriya in 2005, 8 for 70 against England at Trent Bridge in 2006 and 8 for 87 against India at the Sinhalese Sports Club Ground in 2001 among his five best bowling performances, a run of hauls against five different opponents that few bowlers anywhere in the long history of Test cricket have matched for both frequency and scale.
Galle, 2010
Muralitharan played his last Test against India at Galle International Stadium in July 2010, taking 5 for 63 in the first innings and 3 for 128 in the second, 8 wickets in a match Sri Lanka won by 10 wickets. That haul carried him to exactly 800 wickets in the CricArcade archive, reaching the milestone in the very match in which he retired, in front of his home crowd, a storybook conclusion to a career defined by numbers no other bowler has approached before or since.
How he bowled
Muralitharan bowled two deliveries that became signatures of his career: a conventional off-break that turned sharply even on unhelpful pitches, and a top-spinning wrong 'un, sometimes called the doosra, that turned the other way and became one of the most debated deliveries in the modern game, its legality questioned by some of the same biomechanics testing that eventually cleared his action more broadly. What made both deliveries so hard to face was that they came out of a near-identical action, leaving even experienced batters guessing which way a ball would turn until it had already left his hand, a problem conventional off-spinners, who typically offer only one direction of turn, do not usually pose. He took far more wickets at home than away, 493 at 19.57 in 73 Tests in Sri Lanka against 307 at 27.80 in 60 Tests abroad, a split that reflects both helpful home pitches and the greater comfort of bowling in familiar conditions.
The numbers
The CricArcade archive, built from Muralitharan's 133 Test scorecards, records 800 wickets at 22.73, with 67 five-wicket innings and 22 ten-wicket matches, both figures well clear of any other bowler in Test history. His most productive opponent was England, 112 wickets at 20.06 in 16 Tests, and his best decade by volume was the 2000s, 565 wickets at 20.97 from 84 Tests, comfortably the busiest and most productive stretch of his long career. Sri Lanka won 54 of the 133 Tests Muralitharan played, lost 42 and drew 37, and the archive credits him with 19 player-of-the-match awards, a body of work built up match by match across nearly two decades of international cricket. He was a genuine tail-ender with the bat, batting at nine or lower in every one of his 164 innings, with a highest score of 67 against India at Asgiriya Stadium in 2001, his only half-century.
Sources
- CricArcade player page: full career record, best bowling and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Muttiah Muralitharan player profile and Test career statistics
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: the 1998 Oval Test and 2010 Galle Test reports
- Wikipedia: Muttiah Muralitharan