Warne Vs Muralitharan

After some good comments to my previous post I decided to investigate the matter further, especially looking at the Warne and Murali records. It makes for some interesting reading. The StatsGuru at Cricinfo shows a full comparison. Interesting things are that Murali has played 53 out of his 91 tests on home soil(over 58%), that even someone who is blind would know that they are raked over to produce the sort of extreme spin that Murali is so great at. Compare that to Shane who has played only 57 out of 123 tests on his home soil (46.3%). In fact 342 of Muralis wickets have come on home soil, thats a massive 64.2% of his total wickets, compared to Warneys 260 at home or 44.6% of total wickets at home.

Murali has played Zimbabwe 14 times for 87 wickets, and Bangladesh 2 times for 20 wickets (so 15% of his total tests against these two countries have produced over 20% of his wickets). Out of these minnows of Test cricket Warne has played only Zimbabwe once for 6 wickets, and he is yet to play Bangladesh.One wonders what the stats would be if Warne had played the same percentage of tests agaist those countries as well.

Another interesting one is that for Tests played in India, they both appear to struggle. Warne has played 9 tests for 34 wickets at 43.11, where as Murali has 15 wickets from 5 tests at 48.73.

So do these stats do justice in comparing these two greats?