Cricket: Australia throws Murali off course

MUTTIAH MURALITHARAN is one of the world's great bowlers. At present he is being hounded around Australia. Where he should be lauded he is being ridiculed; when he should be hailed he is being spurned. Murali is a prince being treated as a scoundrel.

Quite simply, the Australians think the bewildering Sri Lankan offspinner is a chucker. They have no firm evidence to support this contention and, actually, they have quite the opposite. Yet they have reached a conclusion, demanded a conviction and want to extract punishment.

They will not accept that an action which does not conform to the norm is legal. They said so three years ago through a series of umpiring calls and are saying so now, if, thus far, more insidiously. It is distinctly unsavoury and it is seriously disrupting the Sri Lankan team and casting a large shadow over a one-day tournament in which England are competing tigerishly.

The media have made their point in all manner of ways, abstruse and explicit. The crowds at the Carlton & United triangular series have followed their lead. Each time Murali has come on to bowl he has been greeted with chants of: "No ball." Officialdom has stepped in and stepped out again just as quickly, appearing initially to say that the bowler's action had been reported and then categorically stating that it had not.

It is an open secret that Murali may be called by an umpire before this competition is done. That profession appears to have closed ranks but nods and winks have been distributed like gifts to International Olympic Committee delegates. No call came, except from the terraces, in Sri Lanka's first three matches. It may have arrived in the day-night match in Hobart against Australia but the hottest tip in town is that if it is going to happen it will happen this weekend in Adelaide. What ructions there would be.

Muralitharan is playing under tremendous pressure, intolerable scrutiny and probably has no plans to join his hundreds of thousands of compatriots who have made their homes in Australia. Last summer, when he took 16 wickets against England in a Test at The Oval in as entrancing a piece of bowling as you could ever wish or are likely to see, he was on top of the world. Five months on, he must feel he is in the gutter.

The team have tried to ensure he said nothing but, dignified though that was, he eventually broke his silence before some waiting television cameras. "It's frustrating when you go to the ground and people are shouting at you all the time, that's maybe the most annoying thing than anything else," he said. "But I think the more they shout, the more I'll be tougher. Other bowlers or other batsmen, when they hit a four or take a wicket, the crowd appreciate them. But with me it's the other way round." The only problem, he added, was in Australia.

The relationship between the bowler and the country has, as they say, form. Murali was 23 when he first came to Australia in 1995, at the start of his remarkable international career. Word quickly got around about the youngster with the odd action: a bent arm which some were ready to say straightened in delivery. Once that sort of rumour gains wide circulation it does not fade. Medical declarations that his bent arm is generic and cannot be straightened and the apparent possession by one of his brothers of a similar generic rarity have been given no credence.

He was called seven times for throwing, unusually from the bowler's end, by the respected umpire Darrell Hair in the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne. Later on the tour, in a match against Queensland, the bowler was called again by Ross Emerson. (Hair is not umpiring any Sri Lankan matches in this series after rubbishing Murali's action in a book last year; Emerson is standing in Adelaide this weekend). Controversy ensued but since then, it seemed, nothing - except a burgeoning career. Muralitharan has taken 203 wickets in 42 Tests, one fewer match than it took Shane Warne to reach that amount.

Last August in England, he was a bowler at the top of his game, a finger spinner with corkscrew wrists which had a snap like a crocodile, wrapped over, under and beside the ball and purveyed magic. Whatever the England coach, David Lloyd, said about his unorthodoxy in an unfortunate interview which came across as grapes which were not so much sour as rancid, his action was accepted by the game's followers at large. Throwing comes under the aegis of Law 24.2, which permits bowling with a bent arm but disallows that arm to be straightened "whether it be partial or complete, during that part of the delivery swing which directly precedes the ball leaving the hand".

Then Murali arrived in Australia with the world champions. The innuendo began immediately and has not abated. It is difficult to pin down but there is a suspicion that the whole affair is being propelled by something other than the intricacies (beautiful or criminal, depending on your view) of Murali's action. Not racism, exactly, but stemming from the strained cricketing links between the countries.

The gossip grew so confused at the start of the tournament that Peter van der Merwe, the former captain of South Africa who is the referee, was forced to deny that he had received reports about the action. In a statement the International Cricket Council said that, in any case, public comment by an umpire or referee is not consistent with the confidential nature of its procedures.

The gist of much of the statement is that while umpires can, of course, invoke law 24.2 if they think fit, there is now another method to pin down dodgy actions. If an umpire or referee sees something not to his liking, the referee can request the home board in a series to "instruct the TV network to discreetly obtain footage of the player from different angles using a mixture of normal speed and slow motion cameras." The resultant video is then dispatched to the nine members of the ICC's advisory panel on illegal deliveries, who have a video conference. If, in their opinion, there is reason for doubt, the player's home board is informed and asked to withdraw him from international cricket for remedial action.

The ICC also revealed that as recently as 1997 the panel had examined Murali's action and found it be fair. The panel has not, however, looked at footage of him bowling when Hair called him in the 1995 Melbourne Test and the ICC was also at pains to point out that what applied in 1997 may not apply now. "The panel can only decide on what has happened, not on what may happen," it said in a sentence as convoluted as Muralitharan's delivery.

It also transpires that an Australian scientific institute has scrutinised film of the bowler and declared the action legal: he creates an optical illusion.

Ranjit Fernado, the Sri Lanka manager, conceded that the barracking had affected the team's morale and that they had gone through a trauma, because of being subjected to what amounted to harassment.

"We firmly believe Murali's action has always been fair," he said. But, in Australia, Murali is in danger of being sentenced without trial.