Early Thursday afternoon in Galle, Sri Lanka, India’s Pragyan Ojha pushed forward with his bat and edged the ball into the hands of fielder Mahela Jayawardene. In doing so, he wrote himself into cricketing history, becoming Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800th and final Test victim. That career tally of wickets, from 133 Tests spread over 18 years, puts the 38-year-old Sri Lankan bowler 92 clear of second-placed Shane Warne; only eight other players in the history of the game have even taken half as many Test wickets as the man universally known as Murali.
His retirement feels like the end of a golden age of spin bowling, graced by both Murali and the magnificent maverick Australian leg-spinner Mr. Warne, as well as India’s naggingly brilliant, attritional leg-spinner Anil Kumble. I grew up watching cricket in the 1980s, when spinners were encouraged to spear the ball in fast and straight at the batsmen, restricting run-scoring rather than trying to take wickets, and giving the fast bowlers a breather by wheeling away for a few economical overs. Bowlers like Mr. Warne and Murali turned that on its head, making spinners an attacking weapon on pitches the world over in a way they rarely had been before.

Murali’s career, alas, has also been beset by controversy. Bowlers in cricket aren’t allowed to straighten their bowling arm during delivery; doing so constitutes throwing (known in cricket as “chucking”) and is cricket’s No. 1 no-no. Many a bowler’s career has been finished by umpires declaring their deliveries illegal because of a straightening arm; and with the ball being released at that speed, it’s a hard fault to correct. Repeated accusation of chucking against Murali have been conclusively proved wrong by biomechanical tests conducted at the Universities of Western Australia and Hong Kong, but still there are plenty, in Australia especially but also England, who won’t accept the science (including my own father, with whom I may have had one or two forthright discussions on the subject).

When that blindness spills over into mean-spirited mimicking of the umpire’s shout of “no ball” every time Murali bowls, it’s disappointing. But the man himself has always shrugged off the accusations and innuendo, even going as far as to bowl in an arm brace to show the lack of elbow movement. The illusion that Murali throws the ball comes from two things: his elbow, which is bent all the time thanks to a congenital defect, and his incredible whirlybird rubber wrists, which describe an arc of more than 180 degrees when releasing the ball. (Research inspired by the controversy revealed that almost all bowlers actually straighten their arm slightly, and the rules were modified accordingly.)

The result of Murali’s bowling action is monumental spin, at subtly varying angles that were impossible to predict, delivered with such cunning flight and accuracy that it sometimes seemed as if the bowler had the ball on a piece of string. Murali was also one of the first to perfect the so-called doosra (Urdu and Hindi for “the other one”), which, to cut a long explanation short, spins in the opposite direction from the way it looks like it’s going to. He also imparted an incredible amount of what cricketers call “revs” on the ball, forward rotation that causes it to dip before bouncing and, frequently, kick up high after doing so.

In August 1998, I sat in drooling awe at The Oval in London, watching the final day of a Test match in which he took 16 of the 20 England wickets available, including seven on that day, rolling England over for a second-innings 181 after Sri Lanka had made 591 in their first. It was Sri Lanka’s first win in England, and the match that set the seal on Murali’s reputation not just as a good spin bowler, but as someone who did something completely different with the ball from every other bowler I’d ever seen.

Murali has also been an unfailingly polite, humble and mischievously chirpy presence, both on and off the field. His evident sheer zest for the game is infectious; he’s one of the few bowlers in history whose most frequent response to being belted out of the park is a big grin. Former colleagues talk of his relentless appetite for the game, practicing bowling for hour after hour when not playing. And this from a man who has bowled more than 62,000 balls in international cricket, plus nearly 30,000 more in Sri Lankan domestic cricket.

Universally popular at home, he’s also often been the only Tamil in a mostly Sinhalese team. His importance will be measured not just in his individual achievements, but in the way he lifted a team, relatively new to international cricket, from mediocrity to the highest echelon. Before his career, Sri Lanka won 5% of the Tests they played; during it, they’ve won 37%, which in a sport with a lot of draws is impressive. His phenomenal career figures aside, rarely had a sports team owed one man so much in its rise from also-rans to contenders.

He took them, moreover, for an average of 22.72 runs each, and in the modern era anything below 30 is top-drawer. Murali is also the record wicket-taker in the shorter One-Day International format, with 515 of them, at 23.07 runs each.

The Test record is one he’ll probably keep forever, and not just because of his career’s longevity or the likelihood that fewer Tests matches will be played in future as the super-concise Twenty20 format becomes more popular. Murali’s bowling accounted for more than 40% of the wickets taken by his team during games he played (teams usually pick four or five bowlers), again the highest in Test history.