By Martin Kettle | Guardian
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Would the guileful Sri Lankan bowler – the greatest Asian sportsman of all time, perhaps – cap his final game by dismissing an unprecedented, still almost unbelievable, 800th test match victim? For the many who neither know nor care about such things but who are sufficiently motivated to read on, it may be helpful to understand that only two other bowlers in addition to Muralitharan has ever dismissed more than 600 batsmen in his career and that in nearly a century and a half of trying no Englishman has ever exceeded 383. That's how much in his own league Murali is. In mid-morning came the inevitable confirmation that he had done it.
Murali is simply the best. But don't take my word for it. Take the word of someone who played against him many times without ever fully mastering Murali's array of skills. Batting against him, wrote Steve Waugh, the combative former Australian captain, was the ultimate challenge, "enticing then withdrawing, probing before striking, each delivery a mini-battle". Murali possesses a very even temperament, Waugh says, but like all great artists in any field "he is also focused and driven, always looking to extend his repertoire". In the end, Waugh concludes, "one can only marvel at his unsurpassed record".
There is, however, something beyond the record. Put aside, for a moment, the poignantly appropriate fact that Murali completed his career yesterday on the cricket field at Galle that was swamped by the 2004 tsunami for whose victims he has worked so tirelessly ever since. Put aside, too, the remarkable truth that in a nation, and in a national team, dominated by the majority Sinhalese population during a period of brutal ethnic civil war, this nonpareil player is from the minority Tamil population. Put aside, for that matter, the fact that not one of Mr Murdoch's many TV channels, happy to carry any amount of live darts and minor league football, could be bothered to broadcast yesterday's milestone moment live.
Instead consider this. Amid the overpaid egos and pampered brats who populate so much of contemporary sport, Muralitharan seems to stand almost completely apart, the proverbial good deed in what often feels like an ever naughtier sporting world of drugs, bribes and cheating. With achievements like his on the cricket field, and amid the apparently unconditional adulation of his divided nation, Muralitharan could so easily have become the worst kind of petulant sporting diva. There are many precedents. Nor, after suffering so many insults to, and insinuations about, his bowling action for so long, would it have been any surprise if he had evolved into one of sport's most self-pitying, embittered crazy guys.
On the contrary, as far as one can see, Murali has managed to combine being one of the handful of genuine sporting legends with a calm demeanour, a warm personality and an ability to see his achievements in a healthy perspective. Yesterday, having completed his amazing feat, Murali told interviewers that he was more concerned to be remembered as a nice person than as an often unplayable spin bowler. It is impossible not to contrast both Murali's goodness and his sustained success – he had to capture eight wickets, no mean challenge, in his final game to reach 800 – with the record and demeanour of England's over-hyped footballers with their six-figure weekly wages and lack of basic skills and success.
Murali is a lesson to others too. Last weekend at St Andrews, Tiger Woods battled his way around the Open championship golf course in the wind and rain, playing neither particularly well nor badly, but looking more miserable than a multimillionaire sports star has any right to look. Over the years, I have seen Woods play several times, and I daresay I would never have gone to watch golf in the first place if it hadn't been for his all-round appeal. I once even wrote – confession time – an article about Tiger as the perfect American, a man who embodied with almost laboratory precision the combination of ability, hard work, ethnic mix, glamour and success that make a lot of Americans feel good about themselves. Oh what a fall was there.
Do not forget, though, that before he self-destructed, Woods had an on-course allure that only a handful of sports stars, or stars of any kind, could command. When you saw him approaching down the fairway, it was thrilling, like waiting for Domingo to sing. The aesthetic of his play and his demeanour were mesmerising. His ability to do something truly brilliant was unrivalled.
Over the years, Woods honed all these talents into the most gloriously intimidating aura that the sports world could offer, certainly unprecedented in golf. In modern times, only Federer's command of tennis stands comparison. At St Andrews, however, it was obvious that Woods has lost it. The aura is gone. He is just another fine player, struggling to keep up, a bit like Lance Armstrong in this year's Tour de France, although unlike Armstrong it is possible that Woods may manage to put most of it back together again one day.
The sports world will always crave faster, stronger and higher. Sporting heroes, though, are transient at best and have feet of clay at worst – in sport as in other things, certainly politics. Even Federer has begun to lose, and even Muhammad Ali lost too. And anyone who has put their faith in sporting princes over the years knows how regularly they turn out to be unworthy of the worship that we lavish on them. The day Fred Trueman told the Yorkshire Evening Post he always voted Tory was a particularly hard one for me. Perhaps, as Enoch Powell said of political careers, all sporting careers end in failure too.
But if that is true, then how to explain the amazing Murali? His career ends in triumph not failure, in acclaim not disdain, as a legend not as a loser. Unhappy the land that needs heroes, says Brecht sternly. But perhaps his preceding line – unhappy the land that lacks heroes – is actually truer after all. Idols do not have to fall, like Woods. They can also be worthy, like Murali. Or perhaps I have fallen for the, er, spin.
© Guardian
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