Muttiah Muralitharan’s directions to his home in the hilly suburb of Pelawatte, east of Colombo, are not immediately promising. “It’s past the Parliament. If you get lost, give me a call.” We get lost – a reminder that Murali built a career on trying to simplify the apparently complex – and he’s not picking up his phone. We stop and ask for help. One word is enough: “Murali?” In the year the ICC got tough on chuckers, it will take more than a few three-point turns in tight backstreets to prevent a group of cricket writers from keeping their appointment.
Muttiah Muralitharan was the most successful bowler in the history of international cricket, but his career was dogged by controversy over his action. In 2014, a year after his retirement, Murali gave this frank interview to Wisden editor Lawrence Booth.
It is an overcast November day, the kind which does not necessarily bring to mind visions of Murali – wide-eyed, lips contorted, a flurry of wrists and elbows – wreaking havoc. We are ushered into his reception room, where he emerges with a shy smile, offers us tea, and returns with brimming mugs and packets of biscuits. Are they from his father’s factory in Kandy? He seems not to hear. There are more pressing matters at hand.
We have been asked in advance to steer clear of two topics: Kevin Pietersen and Murali’s bowling action. But his skin has thickened over the years. He has been called a cheat and a chucker – both at once during a Test in Kandy by Nasser Hussain, who wove in a couple of expletives too. He has been no-balled because of his action, mocked and jeered. Tea and biccies with a few hacks is not going to upset him. And, sure enough, while he is merely forthright on Pietersen (“he couldn’t cope with the fame”), he is compelling about the mechanics and ethics of his right arm – which claimed a world-record 800 Test wickets, and was deified and denounced in equal measure.
Is he faking it? Placing my hand on his and pushing down, I can feel no give. This, then, seems to be his natural position. Yes, I could push harder and narrow the angle, but that would cause him discomfort; it may not be the moment to break cricket’s most controversial limb. More to the point, it seems unlikely that as much pressure would occur during the act of bowling.
Murali explains that, at the moment of delivery, the angle – imagine his arm still on the table – would go down to around 27 degrees, which meant his degree of flexion, according to laboratory tests, was 10.5: illegal a decade ago, perfectly legal after he had lobbied for change, and a lot more legal than the off-spinners who came a cropper in 2014.
For his next trick, Murali demonstrates how it is possible to bowl a legal doosra, though his unusual flexibility clearly helps. His action is too quick at first, so he slows it down. To the naked eye, it looks fine. Moeen Ali, who learned the delivery off Ajmal at Worcestershire, managed to bowl what looked like a legitimate doosra during the Headingley Test against Sri Lanka in June. Murali is matter-of-fact about the explanation: “Scientifically, people are different.”
None of this is scientific, of course. The slow-motion doosra could have been illegal, just not obviously so to a bunch of journalists unsure exactly where to look. And it’s tempting to wonder what verdict the ICC’s new accredited testing centres in Australia, India, South Africa and the UK would have reached on Murali’s action. But, unless he subjects himself to a new round of testing – and why would he? – we will never know.
Where he does appear to give his critics at least some succour is in his acceptance that his bent arm helped the suppleness of his corkscrew wrist. “When you really straighten your arm, according to science, the movement of the wrist is less. When you’re bent, it’s more. So I have an advantage with a bent arm.”
This is not an admission of guilt, merely a dispassionate assessment of the quirks that brought Murali 92 more Test wickets than Shane Warne, at a lower average (22 to Warne’s 25). And if he was not always operating within the laws as they stood at the time, then he made a persuasive case for those laws to be changed. Where that places him on the spectrum of legality probably depends on the beholder: cricket people seem disinclined to change their minds about Murali.
Now, more than two decades after his Test debut in August 1992 as a 20-year-old in Colombo, where Allan Border thought he must have been bowling leg-breaks, Murali can sit back and observe a chucking drama in which he isn’t involved. “I can feel sympathy for the bowlers because they should have been tested before, not now,” he says, before allowing his mask to slip a little: “The ICC have to give the bowler something or the game will get very boring, and no young cricketer will want to be a bowler.”
He is not advocating chucking. He just wants the ICC to be sure they know what they’re doing. Fast bowlers’ bouncers, he says, deserve more scrutiny, yet the focus tends to be on spinners – an unintended consequence, perhaps, of his own career. And then, a final plea, almost to the conscience of the bowlers themselves. “I am clear: if you are throwing, you will know. Your elbow moves so much, you will know…”
Outside, the journalists chat about the hour that has just passed. For a few moments we are standing there in the Colombo drizzle, rehearsing cricket’s most infamous action as cars drive past, wondering about the legality of the doosra. If they didn’t know it before, they know it now: inside lives Muttiah Muralitharan.
