.Muttiah Muralitharan, after a fantastic display in the second Test against South Africa in Colombo, managed four consecutive ten-wicket hauls for the second time in his career. No other bowler has done it even once. Is he the greatest spinner of all time? In the June issue of Cricinfo Magazine, Mukul Kesavan investigated.
Normal people don't think about sportsmen, they watch them. The thinking comes later, it's a second-order pleasure. There are those of us who add Virender Sehwag's latest score to his aggregate and divide by the number of innings played (minus the not-outs) to work out how many decimal points his career average has risen, but we do this in secret because we know that it is, like picking one's nose, a furtive pleasure that not everyone is likely to understand. To understand Muttiah Muralitharan, to appreciate what he means to cricket, we should begin, not with his statistics, but his Presence.
The difference between the great and the very good is that the great ones have an aura. Sometimes, first-rate players are undervalued because they lack that je ne sais quoi. Among batsmen, Ken Barrington, Dilip Vengsarkar, Andy Flower, Jacques Kallis, even Rahul Dravid, come to mind as extraordinary players who aren't given their due because of a certain anonymity, whereas Viv Richards, Sunil Gavaskar, Javed Miandad, Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Sehwag, even Mahendra Singh Dhoni, walk the field swaddled in an aura that magnifies them and their doings. Among contemporary bowlers, Anil Kumble suffers most in this area, forever typed as a dogged striver, a wonderful senior pro, but not a Master of the Universe, whereas Imran Khan's cricketing record is lacquered into immortality by his charisma. Glenn McGrath, without question the most dangerous bowler of the modern era, doesn't get his due because his sour glower - either natural or cultivated - and the mean parsimony of his manner make him hard to like or even admire.
Murali lucked out in the business of Presence. He is naturally theatrical, a television camera's delight. That bobbing run-up, the whiplash speed of his arm action, the helicopter wrist, the eyes huge with effort at the point of release, the conspiratorial smile at his team-mates as he returns to his bowling mark, the radiant joy in playing and competing, reach out to the spectator and draw him in. Murali lacks Shane Warne's confidence that every ball bowled might have taken a wicket but for the obtuseness of umpires, or the fiendish luck of batsmen; nor does his body language assert, as Warne's does, that he has an answer to every problem. Sri Lanka have lost too many matches, and Murali lived through too many ambushes, for that kind of swagger. To the spectator, Warne's minimalist, impassive walk-up implies magic; Murali's animation suggestsel ectricity.
