Muttiah Muralitharan, (born April 17, 1972, Kandy, Sri Lanka), Sri Lankan cricketer whose unorthodox delivery made him among the very best and controversial spin bowlers in history and permitted him to take more wickets in both Test and one-day international (ODI) cricket than anyone else who’d ever played the game. In 1995 Muralitharan was called for”chucking” (illegal delivery) seven days in 1 afternoon by a Australian umpire and in a one-day international game by two other Australian umpires. But it was not until four decades after, once more in Australia, he was again charged with throwing. Muralitharan’s development of a new type of delivery filmed the”doosra,” where the ball turns away from a right-handed batsman, motivated still further allegations of throwing in 2004; however, in early 2005 that the ICC modified the rules to allow Muralitharan’s unusual arm motion. Muralitharan attended St. Anthony’s College in Kandy and began bowling off-spin on the advice of his coach. He made his Test debut against Australia in 1992 at age 20, taking two wickets with successive balls.

When England toured Sri Lanka the subsequent calendar year, many batsmen found Muralitharan’s spin hard to read and voiced concern regarding the legitimacy of his bowling action. To the naked eye, Muralitharan seemed to not bowl the ball rather to envision it with a bent arm and elastic wrist. According to the rules of cricket, if his arm was bent and then straightened at the point of delivery, then the ball could be deemed a throw (hence illegal), however, Muralitharan’s arm stayed bent throughout the action. Exhaustive studies by the International Cricket Council (ICC) of both his action and the physiology of his right arm showed that the bend was a natural deformity and therefore not prohibited. If controversy was nearly constant for Muralitharan, so too was his dominance of batsmen. In 2007 he became the second bowler to collect 700 Test wickets at a profession, and when he took his 709th wicket, he passed Australian Shane Warne to turn into the very prolific bowler in history of Test cricket. In February 2009 Muralitharan also assumed the record for most career wickets taken in ODI, exceeding the 502 wickets gathered by Pakistan’s Wasim Akram. In the final game of his Test career, against India at July 2010, Muralitharan took his 800th Test wicket, becoming the first bowler in cricket history to reach that seemingly unreachable mark.