“I asked him, ‘Maybe, this time you will have to share wickets’,” he says. Murali was quick to reply: “He said ‘forget that, now I have to bowl less number of overs to get wickets’. And that is what happened. If you notice, in the last few years against teams like India, he used to get the first wicket after, say, 20 overs. But here he struck quite early, because all the focus was on Mendis.”

After giving this background, Hathurusinghe comes to the ‘round the wicket’ issue. “Once, Murali and I got talking about his cricket. Because of a new rule, Murali was having problems getting lbw decisions because of the big spin. So I suggested to him to change the side. Now when he comes ‘round the wicket’ the ball stays near the stumps and when it straightens after pitching it helps him get more leg before decisions. Besides, the doosra also becomes difficult as it turns across the stance of a right-hander,” he says.

Since the umpires often found it tough to get the trajectory of the ball bowled from this different angle, most 50-50 decisions went against Murali. Hathurusinghe says that Murali doesn’t just work on his variations but also gives a lot of thought to disguising the balls that he has already mastered. Some time back when batsmen started to read his doosra from the revolution of the seam, the spin legend changed the plan. “He worked on bowling his doosra with a scrambled seam and one can notice the difficulty the batsmen are having in reading the offie’s wrong one,” he says.

... contd.