I think Owzat's groupings are conveniently formed to help his argument. If you take a breakdown of each cricketer against each country separately (instead of lumping them together), you will
notice that Murali averages less:
- against every opposition except Pakistan
- in every country except Australia (-50), India (-2), South Africa (-2) and Zimbabwe (-5)
So your whole argument of Murali feeding on low-quality opposition goes out the window. The differential average of 2 per wicket is absolutely trivial. Would you rather take 4/50 or 4/52? Most people wouldn't care, except if one of the 4-fers were top order wickets and the other were bottom order. It has been shown that Murali took more top-order wickets than Warne, but that's because Warne had a solid attack to back him up.
Also, you conveniently ignore the whole England situation, which I also brought up almost 2 weeks ago. Warne played twice as many games against England as Murali played against Ban + Zim. While England are obviously a better team than either of those two, Murali did average lower in and against England than Warne, meaning that if he had the opportunity to play more games against them, his non-minnow averages would
probably be better.
To conclude, ad-verbatim from my original post which you seemed to have ignored just so you can pretend that Murali is statistically worse than Warne: "Both were impressive bowlers. To pretend that Murali only has better numbers because he played a lot of games against Bangladesh/Zimbabwe is faulty. The guy feasted on poor opposition but he destroyed many capable batting line-ups as well.
There's no point in trying to pick one as being better than the other because it is very subjective."