AFTER the Lord Mayor's Show. Even a full house, a lovely late summer's day and a valuable century by Graeme Hick could not prevent the feeling of slight anti-climax which pervaded yesterday's opening day of England's Test against Sri Lanka after the tension and excitement of the series against South Africa, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.
It was an important game of cricket nonetheless, not least for England players hoping to make sure of a place on the plane to Australia. Hick and Mark Ramprakash, whose place was virtually assured in any case, not only crystallised their winter plans but earned the heartfelt thanks of their colleagues for rescuing a drifting innings. They put on 128 in a little under three hours before Ramprakash became the fourth man to depart with that feeling of regret so familiar to all batsmen who play a part in their own dismissal.
The imminence of the winter selections was part of the problem from England's point of view. Even with power to add very substantially today to his not out overnight, Hick is not absolutely certain to be one of the seven specialist batsmen who will be announced in the England party next Tuesday. If, however, this has confirmed his right to go in the minds of the four selectors, the best thing that Alec Stewart could do this morning is to tell him so and to give Hick licence to dominate.
He never quite did so during a measured, correct and chanceless, if not faultless, innings. It has lasted, so far, 5.5 hours. That it was his day, after 12 previous Test innings without even a fifty, became evident when, having made only 14, he should have been comfortably run out by Muralitharan. Later, when he was 70 not out, a miscued square drive landed short of the wicketkeeper but cannoned from one helmet to another to give him a bonus of five runs.
England had been given first use of a blameless brown pitch by a Sri Lankan captain of vast experience who really should have known better. Had the weather been damp or dull it might have been different but for a side whose strength lies in batting and spin bowling, Arjuna Ranatunga's decision made no sense whatsoever. It took a long time, nonetheless, before it became clear that England would not waste a heaven-sent opportunity.
For once, unless the frequency with which batsmen mistimed the ball was deceptive, this was an Oval pitch lacking in pace. The paradox was that two of the three wickets England had lost by the time that the afternoon session was five overs old might have been attributed to a fractionally higher bounce than the batsmen concerned had anticipated.
Mark Butcher, having managed only five and 13 here against Australia last year, had started carefully but without any difficulty when he presented the open blade of a defensive bat to a ball from Pramodya Wickremasinghe, bowling over the wicket, and edged it to second slip. Even more disappointingly, Stewart, the other top-order batsman playing on his home ground, fenced unworthily at his ninth ball and snicked to first slip, giving the slim Suresh Perera, with his high, whippy action, reward for an honest day's work on his first appearance in a Test.
In between these Surrey slip-ups, Steve James played an innings which was at once admirable given the personal circumstances in which he had answered the call to arms at the 11th hour for the second time in the season, and disenchanting to his admirers. Whilst his wife, Jane, expecting their first child, was in the final stages of labour in Cardiff, James was seeing the shine off the new ball with a fair amount of luck but familiar watchfulness and determination.
A lack of foot movement seemed to confirm, sadly, that Mike Atherton's substitute, and former university partner, will always struggle against the best bowling at the highest level. He had made 34 from as many as 101 balls of the 30 overs bowled, with no apparent hurry, by the Sri Lankan bowlers by lunch. They were keen, tidy but largely innocuous. A decisive hook when Wickramasinghe strayed for once from his usual full length was the most satisfying of James's three fours but his on-side play generally was more convincing than his off-side, especially against the slower bowlers.
There was plenty of slow stuff, of course, ordinary on the part of Kumara Dharmasena and Sanath Jayasuriya, anything but ordinary from Muttiah Muralitharan, who kept Sri Lanka in the game with a performance of high-class, flighty off-spin bowling. He struck for the first time in his second over of the afternoon when James, rightly moving his feet, was deceived by the dip which comes from sharp spin and drove a return catch.
Stewart having come and gone all too quickly, Ramprakash played virtually without flaw from the moment he arrived. All this season he has played at his own calm, calculated pace, his concentration intense and technique copybook. Through the bright afternoon, without frill, but putting away the bad balls as required, he and Hick began to put pitch and bowling in perspective.
Ramprakash let Hick have his head as his personal milestone approached with increasing certainty. Driving smoothly, especially when he did not try to hit the ball too hard, he went from 70 to 100 in only 42 balls and finished the day with 14 fours. Ramprakash, however, was out as soon as the hundred arrived, perhaps feeling it was his turn now. A sweep to square leg meant another opportunity spurned but John Crawley needs a big innings more if he is to get to Australia again, and his polished start augured well for today.
Day 2: Crawley seizes the opportunity to book his passage to Australia
IT TOOK a long time for the second day of the Oval Test to ignite but it was splendid when it did. John Crawley dominated a last-wicket partnership of 89 with Angus Fraser which raised England's first innings to 445, a total which made Muttiah Muralitharan's final analysis of seven for 155 all the more admirable. He was in his 60th over when he put an end to a riotous partnership in the second over after tea, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.
England's John Crawley on his way to 156 not outIn the 20 overs which remained, Sanath Jayasuriya underlined the excellence of the pitch by hitting a brilliant and effortless fifty off 58 balls with eight fours. England, failing to bowl a consistent length but quite rightly setting aggressive fields, were in danger of repeating the mistakes made here two years ago when Saeed Anwar, of Pakistan, cut loose in much the same way.
Dominic Cork, bowling flat out at more than 85 mph, had Marvan Atapattu leg before with a straight ball of full length but Darren Gough was not quite at his best, Fraser for once failed to adjust his length to the short stature of Jayasuriya and Ben Hollioake was reminded for the second time in the day that Test cricket demands the highest standards.
All the action in the second half of the day made up for a pedestrian start in which caution prevailed on both sides. Fraser's highest Test score, reached with a six clumped over midwicket off Muralitharan, was another proud moment in an extraordinary year, but for Crawley an innings of 156 not out was a giant stride forward in a Test career which has taken a long time to blossom. A week ago he was only one of several possibilities for the last two batting places on the tour to Australia. Now he is on the plane.
When Graeme Hick edged a drive off an outswinger in yesterday's fourth over, he had probably booked his own ticket, whatever may be said about the relative comfort of batting against Sri Lanka on a flat Oval pitch. Hick may need to be treated as an off-spinning all-rounder to be sure of his trip, leaving only one space for a specialist spinner. For Ian Salisbury, therefore, today is make or break.
When Hick was out yesterday, the long test of character and technique lay ahead for Crawley, then 12 not out, and, with infinite care at first, he passed it.
For much of the day this was not Sri Lanka versus England but Muralitharan versus Crawley. For hour upon hour they had a memorable duel, Crawley, with all that was at stake, very much on the defensive, playing a good deal with his front pad rather than his bat until he bravely released the pressure with a lofted drive back over the bowler's head and then, much later in the morning, with two drives through extra cover in the same over.
Cricket has many kinds of pleasure for the spectator, none more satisfying than those times when there is a balance between an outstanding bowler and batsman. The raw fury of the conflict between Allan Donald and Mike Atherton at Trent Bridge a few weeks ago was one sort of encounter to stir the blood, but there was a different satisfaction yesterday from Crawley's patient struggle against the best finger-spinner in the world. Muralitharan's line, a foot outside the off stump but turning the ball sufficiently to hit them, never wandered and his flight constantly lured the batsman forward.
Crawley occasionally swept and missed but his judgment throughout an innings of five hours and 20 minutes was excellent and his timing had the delicate touch and wonderful precision of a concert pianist. Neville Cardus said of Reggie Spooner, the elegant Lancastrian hero of his youth, that ``he handled his bat as a lady handled her fan''. It is an image equally apt for Crawley. This was an artist at work.
Cautious or not, he made 41 of the 58 England managed in a prosaic morning. He and Hollioake were constrained by Arjuna Ranatunga's defensive fields and an accurate and well-sustained spell of 9-2-15-1 by Wickremasinghe from the Vauxhall End. Tall and fit, he kept a full length and bowled on only one side of the wicket to a well protected offside.
Since Hollioake could find no way of getting to the pitch of Muralitharan's tantalising spin, it was more or less stalemate. To his credit, he did not panic but one dart down the pitch saw him driving only at air - luckily for him the ball hit his pads and when he was 11 he would have been run out by Wickremasinghe off his own bowling if his shy had not missed the stumps. Finally, two overs before lunch, Hollioake was sucked into the spider's web, driving to a deep set mid-on.
Cork is a more experienced player of spin bowling but he found it no easier and Crawley again had to make most of the headway in a partnership of 56 of which Cork's share was six. Eventually, Ranatunga switched Muralitharan, after a brief rest, to the Vauxhall End and he squeezed his first ball through Cork's gate.
By now Crawley was a ship in full sail, playing the ball wristily away to leg or easing it though the covers, but when Muralitharan turned an off-break past Salisbury's front pad to glance his leg stump, he was still four short of his third Test hundred. He reached it with Gough as his partner - his second hundred in successive Oval Tests and two balls quicker than Hick had taken but Gough spooned to the wicketkeeper as he edged a sweep on to his pad and the scene was set for the rousing last-wicket stand.
Fraser simply enjoyed himself; Crawley, with no option but to attack, played in a manner which silenced all doubts about his class. But the impetus this must have given to the new ball bowlers did not produce the wickets hoped for as Jayasuriya cut and drove with crisp, wristy strokes and Atapattu and Jayawardene each displayed the simple orthodoxy which makes the best Sri Lankan batsmen a match for most on a decent pitch like this.
Since, indeed, the three even better players still have to bat, England will have to bowl as well as they can if they are to take command today.
Day 3: England made to suffer by Jayasuriya and de Silva
By Scyld Berry
IT HAS not been the commanding performance which England needed before they set off for Australia. The batting of Sri Lanka's master stroke players, Sanath Jayasuriya and Aravinda de Silva, has made England's cricket look small beer, or perhaps rice-water, by comparison.
When England batted on the first two days, there was a whiff, or stench, of players playing for their tour places rather than focusing on winning the match in hand. For that failure England paid yesterday, as Sri Lanka rattled along without any manifestation of haste, and yet at the extraordinary rate of four runs an over on average and often more.
It was not as if the Sri Lankan batsmen - squat and powerful and yet beautiful timers - attacked England's bowling. They simply waited for the bad balls to arrive on one side of the perfect batting pitch or the other, and put them away with ease. If the England bowlers had a harsh time to help prepare them for Australian conditions, their fielders had little to do in the warm sunshine beyond trot to the confines to pick up the ball.
Jayasuriya and de Silva came together when England made the costly mistake of dismissing Sri Lanka's No 3, caught in the gully off a loose drive. However fine a batsman Mahela Jayawardene may be, it is inconceivable he could have matched the virtuosity of the batsmanship which ensued, and kept on ensuing, until Jayasuriya had made a double hundred and Sri Lankan supporters in the crowd, deprived for so long of a sight of their team in this country for being 'unfashionable', were almost drunk on the rice-water of it all.
Perhaps no other pair of Test batsmen in the world could have batted so brilliantly and for so long at so rapid a rate. Brian Lara and Carl Hooper might have matched the brilliance, but not the appetite of the Sri Lankans; Australians would not have allowed themselves such panache, not against England. Sachin Tendulkar, of course, could have surpassed the pair off his own bat, but Mohammed Azharuddin, as he is now in his dotage, does not care to undertake unduly long innings.
Jayasuriya scored the vast majority of his runs on the offside, and very few on the leg except when Ian Salisbury tempted him irresistibly to pull, and when he picked up Dominic Cork for six. As de Silva played second sitar to him, Jayasuriya was the power behind the Sri Lankans' plunder of 113 runs from 27 overs before lunch, and another 125 from 29 before tea. It was just as well for England that the pair were loath to do anything quicker than waddle between wickets.
De Silva started at speed, glancing his third ball for two, off-driving the next for four, and pulling his sixth for four, all off Angus Fraser, before throttling down to bat with maximum certainty. There was nothing new about Jayasuriya's batting in so much that he has made a Test score of 340 and Sri Lanka has never lacked for glorious shot-makers; the novelty lay in the patience which de Silva demonstrated, notably in the hour after lunch when he added two singles, though Jayasuriya so dominated the strike as well as the bowling in this hour that de Silva faced only 28 balls.
Jayasuriya had sped to 59 off 71 balls overnight. He picked up by crashing Darren Gough twice through the covers as the bowler felt the power of the Sri Lankan's forearms. Ben Hollioake's harrowing day began with nine runs from his opening over as de Silva glanced him and his partner slashed him over gully; the 50 stand came up from 39 balls when Jayasuriya cut Hollioake to the boundary, though cover was 50 yards deep.
When de Silva reached 23, he became the first of his countrymen to reach 5,000 Test runs and set about the next thousand as most of England's bowling offered everything save length and direction. As in the South African series, no matter how many bowlers England's selectors pick, there only ever seem to be three of them.
Jayasuriya's fifth Test 100 came from only 124 balls. As he pressed on to 213 from 278 balls - he was out in only the 80th over of the innings, a rate of scoring beyond the ken of previous generations of opening batsmen - records flowed to the Sri Lankans' credit. His stand of 243 with de Silva, in only 55 overs all told, was the highest for any Sri Lankan wicket against England, or for their third wicket against any country.
Salisbury kept de Silva quiet for a while after lunch, if only by bowling from round the wicket outside his legs, before lapsing short against Jayasuriya, who surged to his 150 by taking 25 runs from seven consecutive balls. The harvest season was resumed in earnest as the bowlers sprayed, and the fielders stood to attention as the ball flew past. A few deliveries under Jayasuriya's ribs showed what might have been if the pitch had been harder and faster, and were his sole cause of discomfort.
It is worthy of record that a ball from Fraser passed Jayasuriya's bat when he had scored 201: it might even have brushed his bat's edge as he cut. Following the tea interval he was out for sure, caught off a long-hop which he gloved down the legside. At the age of 29 the Sri Lankan left-hander is within reach of the consummation which a certain nonagenarian from Australia has alone achieved: that of scoring at a rate appropriate to one-day cricket with the certainty appropriate to a Test match.
So slow was England's over-rate that they had 34 overs to bowl in the final session, time for de Silva to reach his 17th Test century and Sri Lanka to approach first-innings parity. The old ball would not reverse-swing, or the second new ball swing in the conventional manner, let alone seam, as England experienced a bitter foretaste of what it will be to bowl on Australian turf.
Day 4: England left vulnerable to the magic of Muralitharan
OUTBATTED and outspun, England face a rearguard action today no less demanding than the one which eventually succeeded at Old Trafford against South Africa in July, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.
Then the challenge was to hold out against hostile fast bowling; today, on the final day of the Oval Test, it is an off-spinner of exalted class, Muttiah Muralitharan, who holds the key to Sri Lanka's second successive Test victory over England, 5.5 years after their first.
England batted a second time half an hour before tea on the fourth day after a last-wicket stand of 59 had swollen Sri Lanka's first innings to a rapidly acquired 591. It was their first total of above 500 away from home and it gave them a lead of 146 which the magic-man from Kandy almost immediately exploited with bright-eyed relish.
In successive overs he deceived Mark Butcher and Graeme Hick but Steve James, using his experience to bat with reassuring solidity, battled it out for 42 overs and Alec Stewart stayed with him to the close of a tense evening session.
England, with eight wickets left, are still 92 runs behind and a long, hard day stretches ahead of them. But the even bounce of the pitch gives them a good chance of getting through the day and into a sufficient lead to make themselves safe, provided they make a decent start.
If Sri Lanka had picked their young left-arm orthodox specialist, Niroshan Bandaratilake, who took 16 wickets in three Tests against New Zealand in April, there might be no escape. As it is, Muralitharan is almost a host in himself. He drew a desperately struggling Butcher down the pitch to have him stumped in the 15th over and had Hick leg before second ball, going back instead of forward.
The youthful Muralitharan contributed four for 118 and one for 55 towards Sri Lanka's five-wicket win at the Sinhalese Sports Club in March 1993. England's captain Stewart, then in charge for the second time as Graham Gooch's substitute, remembers all too clearly how a substantial first-innings score was no guarantee of safety against high-class attacking batsmen and slow bowlers with quirky actions.
This time the pitch has turned out to be a batsman's paradise do not forget Ranjit Fernando's spot-on observation that Muralitharan would turn the ball on the M4 - but Sri Lanka scored their runs at 3.76 an over compared with England's 2.8 and therein lies the extraordinary possibility that they will win today despite the sort of total, 445, which virtually eliminates defeat in most contemporary Test matches.
It was not just the size of England's first-innings total but the fact that they batted until after tea on the second day which ought to have made them safe. But Sanath Jayasuriya, simply by playing his natural game and putting away every bad ball he received, timed the ball with a wristy brilliance throughout and found the gaps over a rapid oufield quite unerringly. Because of their lack of inches - Jayasuriya and Aravinda de Silva are both 5ft 6in - England bowled shorter to them than they often intended.
Jayasuriya made his 213 in under six hours with 33 fours and a six. Of his four previous Test hundreds, one had been 340, another 199. With admirable modesty he gave much of the credit to de Silva, who, starting with three sublime strokes, had looked like scoring an even faster hundred than Jayasuriya's.
Instead, he settled to the sort of controlled, masterful innings which Javed Miandad, of Pakistan, a player he in some ways resembles, displayed on a very similar Oval pitch when he made 260 in 1987.
Strangely the seven men to have scored double hundreds against England since have been left-handed: Mark Taylor, Vinod Kambli, Aamir Sohail, Allan Border, Brian Lara and, in the space of four Tests, Gary Kirsten and Jayasuriya. An analytical coach ought to be able to make some deduction from that. (Refuse to play against sides with left-handers, perhaps.)
De Silva's 152 was his 17th Test hundred, an innings of immense patience, especially given England's belatedly improved bowling performance yesterday. By Saturday evening the Sri Lankans had already got a lead of one run but Darren Gough saved his side from a far worse plight by taking two wickets in two balls in the third over yesterday as both Arjuna Ranatunga and Hashan Tillekeratne walked in front of inswingers of full length.
Until now Butcher, at medium pace, had been the only man to swing the ball and he was given a good spell yesterday morning from the pavilion end. Dominic Cork's attempt to bounce his little opponents out instead of bringing them on to the front foot merely played into their hands but a good-length ball accounted for Romesh Kaluwitharana. After a bold, slightly chancy innings he drove fiercely to extra cover and was dextrously caught by John Crawley.
De Silva gave Ben Hollioake his second wicket as he drove at a good-length ball shortly before lunch. It was reward for some pacy bowling by Hollioake which confirmed his improvement and justified the selectors' assessment of Surrey's 20-year-old vis-ˆ-vis Andrew Flintoff.
The latter is a batsman who bowls whereas Stewart believes Hollioake to be capable of developing into a feasible third seamer by the time the Sydney Test arrives in January, when two spinners may be required.
Alas, Stewart did not even trust his sole spinner yesterday, even against tailenders. It was a deflating indictment of Ian Salisbury, who had looked at least as likely as anyone else to get a wicket on Saturday. His leg-break turned quite sharply at times and his googlies were not often deciphered, but he lacked both luck and the confidence to sustain the pressure.
The consequence was that after Angus Fraser had taken the eighth and ninth wickets quickly after lunch, Stewart waited far too long to bring on the man who was most likely to break the last-wicket stand.
Suresh Perera swung straight and often in a merry first Test innings and Muralitharan stepped away and slogged before edging a cut and turning to the more serious business of trying to bowl England out again.
Day 5: Murali completes England rout
A PHENOMENAL individual performance by Muttiah Muralitharan was more than a match for England and Sri Lanka won an extraordinary Test by 10 wickets with only nine overs of the final day left, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.
Had Alec Stewart not been run out in the morning, Muralitharan would surely have become only the second bowler in the history of the game to take all 10 wickets in a Test innings. As it is, his 16 for 220 from 113.5 overs is the fifth-best Test analysis recorded.
Sri Lanka knocked off the 36 they needed in only five overs after Murali ended an excellent four-hour innings by Mark Ramprakash just in time. Darren Gough's doughty support in a ninth-wicket partnership of 53 took England to tea with a lead of 15 but Ramprakash was brilliantly caught at short-leg and Gough, after 2.5 hours of defiance, bowled round his legs to give the conjurer from Kandy his wonderful second-innings figures of nine for 65.
It was Sri Lanka's second successive win over England, five years after the last game in Colombo in March 1993. That was their first home win against England, but to have repeated it overseas, albeit in conditions which suited their talents so well, was a triumph which deserves no qualification.
They won the World Cup with batting of unprecedented imagination and flair and now they are winning Tests by classical attacking batting and a bowler who can destroy sides by himself. On a true, dry pitch like this they could beat anyone, in any five-day game, anywhere. And no wonder Lancashire want Muralitharan as their overseas successor to Wasim Akram.
It has been one of the oddities of history that Tony Lock took only one wicket at Old Trafford in 1956 when Jim Laker, whose haul of 193 Test wickets Murali has now surpassed, dismissed 19 Australians. But there were other high-class bowlers in that England side. In this particular Sri Lankan team, the 26-year-old off-spinner with the double-jointed wrist was a one-man attack.
One must take seriously the explanation given by his canny captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, for fielding first on a beautiful batting pitch. He did not want Muralitharan to have to bowl more than 100 overs in two days if England followed on. That is confidence of a rare order, contrasting with the England officials who expressed their fears about the dryness of the pitch in advance.
Ranatunga's decision remains bizarre but Sanath Jayasuriya's brilliant double hundred made the toss almost irrelevant anyway. The speed with which he scored his first hundred - 124 balls paved the way for the extraordinary events which followed. He pulled and cut Angus Fraser for two sixes as the match was won in a blaze of strokes.
Muralitharan's figures were his best in 42 Tests in which he has now taken 203 wickets. He has claimed five wickets in an innings 16 times, and 10 or more in a match twice, the first occasion against Zimbabwe last winter in his home town, up in the green hills at Kandy. A tooth of the sacred Buddha is preserved in the temple there. Murali is not quite a demi-god himself - they keep their sport in slightly better perspective in Sri Lanka than they sometimes do on the mainland to the north - but it is safe to say that he will once again be accorded a hero's welcome on his return.
He was only 20 when he took five wickets in the 1993 Test between these two countries, having played three first-class matches without taking a wicket as a promising tyro in England in 1991. What was striking then was his flight as much as his curious, wristy action. He has got better and better and if he bowls for another 10 years in Test cricket he could become the biggest wicket-taker of them all. Only two men, Clarrie Grimmett and Waqar Younis, have reached 200 Test wickets in fewer Test matches.
The action, the permanently bent elbow due to a slight deformity at birth and the freakish ability to rotate the wrist will continue, no doubt, to trouble bamboozled opponents but he has been cleared by the ICC as a legitimate bowler since the shattering day late in 1995 when he was no-balled by Darrell Hair for throwing in a Test at Melbourne.
David Lloyd, England's coach, chose an unwise moment to repeat past insinuations on Sunday night. It was curmudgeonly but he was cleared of any violation of the code of conduct when the president of Sri Lanka's Board raised the matter with the ICC referee, Judge Ebrahim. Happily, Stewart was careful not to repeat the suggestion of sour grapes after the match.
He has no reason to be depressed by England's failure to bat out the day but the Australians will back themselves on true pitches against the team announced from Lord's this morning because the best seam attack England can muster was mastered with ease.
England lost their last eight wickets yesterday in fits and starts. After 11 quiet overs, Steve James's determined resistance was ended when he pushed forward and was caught at silly point off bat and pad.
But Stewart was playing well, picking up sufficient runs to give his side hope from the assortment of bowlers at the other end, until Ramprakash called for a quickish single to square-leg. Upil Chandana, fielding as substitute for Aravinda de Silva, swooped and hit the only stump visible to him with a throw on the turn.
It was an inspired piece of work but Muralitharan had many a hard over to come. Ramprakash was both positive and sound and John Crawley's technique looked equally adept during a partnership of 18 overs. Murali, however, drew him into a drive with the flight and dip of a true spinner in the last over before the interval and he was bowled off his pads.
Off the first ball after lunch, Ben Hollioake, clipping half-heartedly to leg, was lbw and half an hour later Dominic Cork and Ian Salisbury became, respectively, Muralitharan's 199th and 200th Test victims in the same over.
That Ramprakash and Gough then made the hero work so hard for his final breakthrough and that no other bowler remotely threatened them even after a new ball had been claimed at 147 for eight, showed what a good pitch it remained and what a fantastic piece of bowling this was.
More: Muralitharan spins England out of control
By Peter Deeley
SIXTEEN Test wickets by the spinner Muttiah Muralitharan took Sri Lanka to their first victory in this country over England by 10 wickets at the Oval yesterday.
Only two bowlers in Test history have taken more wickets in a game. Muralitharan dismissed nine of the 10 batsmen in England's second innings, the other falling to a run-out. With match figures of 16-220, he has now taken a total of 203 wickets in 42 Tests.
His achievement was marred by remarks made by David Lloyd, the England coach, who said that he would be expressing his views on the spinner's ``unorthodox'' bowling action to the cricket authorities. Lloyd denied that this was sour grapes. He said: ``It isn't being churlish. It is the way things have to be.''
Muralitharan, who has a permanently bent arm and is double-jointed at the wrist, was called for throwing in Australia three years ago. The International Cricket Council cleared him after examining video tapes. The Sri Lankan cricket board has asked its England counterpart to explain Lloyd's comments. Thilanga Sumathipala, the tourists' board president, said: ``It was all highly uncalled for. If Lloyd had any concerns he should have gone to the match referee and not the media.''
England's captain, Alec Stewart, distanced himself from Lloyd, saying that he had no complaint about Muralitharan. He said: ``He is a bowler of high quality and deserves a pat on the back.'' Stewart admitted that the defeat had ``taken some of the gloss off the summer''.
Today England announce their party to take on Australia in the winter Ashes tour, but Stewart said that the Sri Lanka game had made no difference to the selectors' plans. He said: ``The squad has been chosen.''