Murali retiring after Galle test

[Cricketman]

And people forget that Warne had an attack of McGrath, Lee, Gillespie and other quality bowlers like McGill, Kapserwitz (sp) etc to back him up while Murali had only Vaas - that too mostly in conditions where the left armer was basically rendered useless. (For the most part)

 

[Dare]

Got to love some of the Aussies that posted in this one. Ignorance to facts.

 

[War]

My position on the Warne vs Murali debate has evovled over the years to believe that Murali was fractionally better than Warne.

I think batsmen found Murali slightly harder to pick/read that Warne at their peaks.

What titled it in slight favour of Murali for me was watching Warne & Murali bowling in consecutive English summers in 2005 & 2006. Warne bowled a pretty much his absolute peak, single handedly keeping AUS in the Ashes. But the next year i honestly thought England's batsmen where even more lost againts Murali.

 

[Mike23]

^ The one thing common in those 2 tours was how Kevin Pietersen took apart Warne and Murali.

 

[sohum]

I think Owzat's groupings are conveniently formed to help his argument. If you take a breakdown of each cricketer against each country separately (instead of lumping them together), you will notice that Murali averages less:

- against every opposition except Pakistan
- in every country except Australia (-50), India (-2), South Africa (-2) and Zimbabwe (-5)

So your whole argument of Murali feeding on low-quality opposition goes out the window. The differential average of 2 per wicket is absolutely trivial. Would you rather take 4/50 or 4/52? Most people wouldn't care, except if one of the 4-fers were top order wickets and the other were bottom order. It has been shown that Murali took more top-order wickets than Warne, but that's because Warne had a solid attack to back him up.

Also, you conveniently ignore the whole England situation, which I also brought up almost 2 weeks ago. Warne played twice as many games against England as Murali played against Ban + Zim. While England are obviously a better team than either of those two, Murali did average lower in and against England than Warne, meaning that if he had the opportunity to play more games against them, his non-minnow averages would probably be better.

To conclude, ad-verbatim from my original post which you seemed to have ignored just so you can pretend that Murali is statistically worse than Warne: "Both were impressive bowlers. To pretend that Murali only has better numbers because he played a lot of games against Bangladesh/Zimbabwe is faulty. The guy feasted on poor opposition but he destroyed many capable batting line-ups as well. There's no point in trying to pick one as being better than the other because it is very subjective."

 

[sami ullah khan]

Sohum, some people just love to argue. Some Aussie fans will always claim Warne to be the better bowler than Murali no matter what. And people who call him a chucker, they try being more loyal to the king than the king himself. Warne himself has emphatically called Murali's action legal. I don't know why Warne's fans won't listen to their idol.

 

[SAfrican]

nothing to do with the debate between the two but i could sit and watch warne bowl all day. his bowling/action is mesmerising and watching him bowl would have to be up there as one of my greatest pleasures in watching the game, equalling watching sachin at his flawless best for mine.

and for those who say murali got rarely dominated by the greater batsmen of the modern era, what about ponting ? or lara who dominated him on his own turf.

 

[War]

^ The one thing common in those 2 tours was how Kevin Pietersen took apart Warne and Murali.

Indeed. Haa one of the funny things about KP is that he dominated/socred hundred againts the likes of Murali/Warne/Kumble/Harbhajan. But odly & frustrating in a few series has found himself getting out to JOKE spinners like Benn, Haurtiz, Harris, Razzak

 

[Robelinda]

nothing to do with the debate between the two but i could sit and watch warne bowl all day. his bowling/action is mesmerising and watching him bowl would have to be up there as one of my greatest pleasures in watching the game, equalling watching sachin at his flawless best for mine.

and for those who say murali got rarely dominated by the greater batsmen of the modern era, what about ponting ? or lara who dominated him on his own turf.

Indeed, Ponting played Murali amazingly well on that 1999 tour, looked totally at ease as most were failing around him. His footwork and shot selection was excellent, some cracking shots of Murali. Thats why it was quite odd that 18 months later he was failing in India in 2001.