It’s a question most of the world’s best international players have tried and failed to answer at one time or another. And Bermuda’s frontline batsmen have also been forced to grapple with it for the last few days during the final preparations for their World Cup debut. How on earth do you play the great Muttiah Muralitharan?

Despite ongoing reservations about the legitimacy of his bent-arm action in some quarters, Murali continues to take a frightening number of wickets both in the Test arena and in One Day Internationals.

He is Sri Lanka’s one real gem, the most famous and successful player in their cricketing history.

While he was a menacing force for much of his early career, over the past five years he has become even more destructive as a bowler having perfected the ability to spin the ball both ways without any discernable change in action.

The legendary “doosra” is bowled out of the back of the hand and transforms what looks like his conventional, big-spinning off-spinner into a fizzing leg break — a magical variation which has embarrassed and bamboozled most world-class players.

The evolution of the doosra totally revolutionised off-spin bowling, which particularly after the emergence of the leg-spinning sensation Shane Warne in the mid-1990s, was perceived as a bit of a dying art. While leg spinners had long bowled their version of the doosra - the googly - never before had it even been considered physically possible for a run-of-the-mill off-spinner to turn the ball in two different directions.

But now, all around the world, there are aspiring off-spinners who are being told by their coaches that they’ll never make it far in the game unless they can bowl both the doosra and the off-break — though without Murali’s famously double-jointed wrists, most others have found the delivery extremely difficult to master.

The response to Murali’s freakish ability has been drastic by necessity.

In England they recently developed a high-tech new bowling machine — christened “Merlin” — in a so far vain attempt to successfully counter the Murali factor.

Merlin, built by a pair of cricket-mad engineers from England, is capable of making the ball spin sharply both ways with just the flick of a button and has assisted a lot of Test-class batsmen work out a technique for dealing with Murali’s deadly trade.

Bermuda’s players, however, have had no such luxury and will have to take on the world’s best spin bowler having never faced anything remotely like him before. The only batsmen who has come across the “smiling assassin” in competition is David Hemp, who had the dubious pleasure of playing against him in an English county championship game almost nine years ago when Murali was Lancashire’s overseas pro and the current Glamorgan captain was pushing for a place in the full England team.

Worryingly, he didn’t fare too well in that encounter and was dismissed lbw by Murali when only in single figures — though he still insists that he was a victim of a dodgy umpiring decision.

At that stage, the doosra was not yet part of the Sri Lankan’s armoury, but Hemp recalled yesterday what a handful he was even back then.

“It was still pretty early on in his career and while I think he was working on the one that goes the other way, he wasn’t as far as I can remember using it yet in matches,” he said after the team’s final net session at the Queen’s Park Oval.

“He was still exceptional though even at that time, and turned his off-break more than anybody I’d ever faced before. Every single delivery was a challenge and I’m sure it will be exactly the same now, if not tougher.

“We’ve talked a little bit among ourselves about what the best way of handling him is, but to be honest we’ll have to see how the wicket plays before making a decision as to what I’m going to try and do.

“There are plenty of options. You can hang back, wait for the turn and play him solely off the pitch, or you can try and use your feet to disrupt his length.

“The danger with that obviously though is that he can spin it both ways so you could find yourself coming down the wicket to what you think is an off spinner and all of a sudden it’s gone like a leg break and you’ve been stumped.

“Taking a big stride down the wicket and trying to sweep him is something I’ve seen other players try and do against him, but that’s only a safe option if you’ve got consistent bounce in the wicket. If not, sweeping is a bit of a lottery and there’s always the possibility of getting a top edge if you’re not quite to the pitch and it bounces a little more than you’re expecting.

“So we’ll have to wait and see really. It’s a challenge I’m looking forward to; it’s definitely not a situation I fear. Provided we can stick around for a while against him and have a good look, we should be able to emerge better players for it. That’s the way I try to look at it anyway.”

Asked about Murali’s threat yesterday, skipper Irving Romaine stressed that they just could not afford to be frightened of him.

“Obviously he’s a great bowler but coach has been telling us to approach facing him in as positive a manner as possible,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean running down the wicket and trying to smack it out of the stadium. What it does mean is that if the ball is there to hit, we’ve got to go after it.

“We’ve watched a lot of tapes of how other teams look to play him, and most of the time even the great players just try to knock him into the gaps and take the ones and twos.

“Nobody we’ve seen has really looked to take him apart because I think you’re just on a hiding to nothing if you tried that approach.

“The sweep shot is an option, but really we only have a couple of guys in the team who play that shot regularly. It’s not a shot that many of us seem to play that often in Bermuda and it would be a bit foolish to try and make those sorts of adjustments at this stage!

“So we’ll probably just look to play as straight as possible and take the singles when we can because he doesn’t bowl too many bad balls.

“But when the bad balls come, it’s important that we take full advantage of them. A half volley is a half volley no matter who’s bowling the ball and I think it’s important we all remember that.”