JOIN USMurali likely to miss T20s
The 37-year-old bowled through the injury to pick up four for 195 from 51 overs in India’s first innings in the final Test to boost his tally of Test wickets to 792. “I got hit when I was playing football,” Muralitharan revealed on Saturday. “Two ligaments are damaged in the fingers. I was bowling with the injury the whole of yesterday. It will take a few days to recover from the injury. I am not too sure about the Twenty20 games yet, but I should be okay for the one-day internationals.”
The T20 games are scheduled for Nagpur on Wednesday and Mohali next Saturday. The first one-day international is in Rajkot on December 15.
Muralitharan conceded that only two things could happen in the final Test now. “We might draw or lose this game,” he said. Asked how disappointed he was not to be in a Test-winning side in India, he replied philosophically, “I would say it’s fate, these things happen in life. God won’t give you everything in life. It’s one of those things that’s not meant to be. At the end of the day, cricket is a game. If you haven’t done well, you haven’t done well. For all my experience, I didn’t do well in this series. At least when I play against the West Indies next year (his final Test series), I will try to go out on a high.
“It’s not been a rosy series for me,” he went on. “I took nine wickets for 550-odd runs. I guess it happens to all bowlers. Overall as well, we haven’t got that many wickets in this series and that’s why India are on top of this game. But you have to admit they played really well, too. They put pressure on us and didn’t allow us to bowl to our plans. They stuck to their plans.”