Wicket hunter Muttiah Muralitharan will retire from Test cricket after the first Test against India. Muralidaran broke the back of India’s resistance in the first innings by taking out MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh, after Virender Sehwag’s soft dismissal, and forced India to bat again.
The story of the morning was Murali, who was puzzlingly introduced rather late in the first session but didn’t miss the opportunity to stamp his presence. Dhoni and Yuvraj had shared a 74-run partnership when Murali showcased his class. First up, he swallowed Dhoni with his signature offbreak: Dhoni stumbled forward, saw the ball dip rapidly on him and decided to desperately lunge out in the end to defend. The ball broke back in sharply to find the fatal bat-pad gap. Murali then removed Yuvraj much in the same way as he did in the second innings and went on to wrap up the tail without much fuss.
Murali had announced he would retire after the home series against West Indies late this year, but in last November he said he could advance the Test retirement. “I am 37 years old and I can’t bowl as much as those days because I get tired after 15-16 overs,” he had told Cricinfo then. “But I will try and play a little bit of one-day cricket – that’s only 10 overs to bowl. If I find everything is not going well I might retire from both forms of the game before the World Cup.”
Murali has taken 792 wickets in 132 Tests and 515 wickets in 337 ODIs. Galle will be an interesting shot at retiring with 800 Test wickets.
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