For Me, Muttiah Muralitharan And Indian Spinners Were Certainly Better Than Shane Warne – Sunil Gavaskar

Updated - 07 Mar 2022, 05:23 PM

Shane Warne. (Photo: Twitter)

Table of Contents

Legendary Indian batsman Sunil Gavaskar has opined that the legendary Sri Lanka spinner Muttiah Muralitharan And India National Cricket Team spinners were certainly better than legendary Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne, who is regarded as the greatest leg-spinner of all time.

Warne died of a suspected heart attack on Friday in Koh Samui, Thailand and according to Thai police, Warne’s four friends battled for 20 minutes to try and save the life of the Australian legend but they failed.

Sunil Gavaskar. Photo- Twitter — (Photo: Twitter)

Spin wizard Warne made his debut in 1992 for Australia and went on to pick 708 wickets in 145 Tests and Muralitharan, who also made his debut in 1992, bagged 800 wickets in 133 Tests. The above-mentioned bowlers are the only two bowlers in history to bag 700+ Test wickets.

Meanwhile, batting legend Gavaskar when asked if the Australian spinner Shane Warne was the greatest spinner of all time, to which he replied by saying that he rates Muralitharan and Indian spinners higher than Warne. He said that the performance of the Australian leg-spinner in India was “pretty ordinary”.

Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne — Image Credit – Twitter

“No, I wouldn’t say that no. For me, the Indian spinners and Muttiah Muralitharan were certainly better than Shane Warne,” Gavaskar said on ‘India Today’.

“Because look at Shane Warne’s record against India. It was pretty ordinary. In India, he got five wickets only once in Nagpur, and that too because Zaheer Khan swung wildly against him to give him a fifer.”

I don’t think I would call him the greatest – Sunil Gavaskar on Shane Warne

Gavaskar further added that he wouldn’t call Warne as greatest because he didn’t have much success against Indian players, who were good players of spin.

“Because he did not have much success against Indian players who were very good players of spin, I don’t think I would call him the greatest,” Gavaskar said.

“Muttiah Muralitharan with a greater success he had against India, I would rank him over Warne in my book,” he added.

The former Indian captain also lauded Warne and said that he mastered a difficult craft of wrist spin and he used to bowl “magic deliveries”.

“He mastered a craft which is so difficult to master, which is wrist spin. To pick 700-plus wickets as he did in Test cricket plus hundreds more in one-day cricket just tells you how good a bowler he was,” Gavaskar said.

“Finger spin is a lot easier, you have a lot more control over what you want to bowl, but leg-spin or wrist spin is very, very tough.

“For him to have bowled the way he did, the way he seemed to create magic, the way he seemed to be able to deliver magic deliveries at will was the reason why he was revered all over the world,” he added.

Also Read: IND vs SL: Ravichandran Ashwin’s Impact Has Been Close To That Of Kapil Dev – Gautam Gambhir

Get All Cricket match prediction and fantasy Tips – CLICK HERE