Muralitharan

Muttiah Muralitharan retired in 2010 as Test cricket's leading wicket-taker with 800, a record no one has come within 130 wickets of since, and also the only bowler to pass 500 ODI wickets. No other career in the sport combines that scale of achievement with the scale of the controversy that shadowed it: for most of his 18 years at the top, Muralitharan's bowling action was disputed, tested, and eventually redefined the law he was accused of breaking.

An action unlike any other

Muralitharan was born with a congenitally bent right arm that he could not fully straighten, and an unusually flexible wrist and shoulder that let him generate huge spin from a short run and an open-chested, wristy release. That combination made him devastating — he averaged more than six wickets per Test — and made his action look, to the naked eye, like a throw. Sir Donald Bradman, after watching replays of the controversy that would define Muralitharan's early career, was quoted calling it "the worst example of umpiring" he had witnessed and stating flatly, "Murali does not throw the ball."

Called seven times on Boxing Day, 1995

The defining incident came in the second Test between Sri Lanka and Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day 1995, when Australian umpire Darrell Hair no-balled Muralitharan seven times for throwing in front of a crowd of more than 55,000. Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga briefly walked his team off the field in protest. Ten days later, umpire Ross Emerson no-balled him again in an ODI in Brisbane. Muralitharan underwent biomechanical analysis at the University of Hong Kong in February 1996, which concluded that his fixed elbow deformity created what researchers called an "optical illusion of throwing," and the ICC cleared his action — a clearance repeated in 1999 after Emerson called him again in Adelaide.

The doosra, and the 15-degree law

The controversy resurfaced in 2004 over Muralitharan's doosra, a delivery that spun the opposite way to his stock off-break with no visible change in action. Match referee Chris Broad reported it, and laboratory testing at the University of Western Australia measured his elbow extension on the doosra at 14 degrees — beyond the 5-degree limit then in force for spinners. Rather than banning Muralitharan alone, the ICC commissioned a wider study; a panel that included former West Indian fast bowler Michael Holding found that measured under the same conditions, close to every bowler in the game straightened their arm to some degree, many of them by 11 or 12 degrees. On that evidence, the ICC in 2005 set a single 15-degree tolerance for all bowlers — a threshold under which Muralitharan's doosra, and the actions of most of his contemporaries, were legal. He was never once ordered to remodel his action.

The wicket-taking record, twice won

Muralitharan passed Courtney Walsh's Test record of 519 wickets in May 2004, only to be overtaken himself later that year by Shane Warne while sidelined by shoulder surgery. He reclaimed the record for good on 3 December 2007 and held the ICC's number-one Test bowler ranking for a combined 1,711 days — longer than anyone else in the game's history. His retirement, on his own terms, was as dramatic as anything the controversy produced: in his final Test, against India in July 2010, his very last ball of his career was his 800th Test wicket.

Format	Matches	Wickets	Average
Tests	133	800	22.72
ODIs	350	534	23.08

Legacy

Muralitharan was part of Sri Lanka's 1996 World Cup-winning side and played in three World Cup finals, but it is the wicket tally and the fight over how he took them that define his place in the game's history. He remains cricket's all-time leading wicket-taker in both Tests and internationally combined, and the biomechanical work triggered by his case permanently changed how every bowler's action, before or since, is judged. Full career statistics are on the Muralitharan player profile.