Mesmeric Mendis ready to enter the pantheon of spin greats
Sri Lankan spinning sensation Ajantha Mendis's unique carrom ball has brought early comparisons with Muttiah Muralitharan
* Dileep Premachandran
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday July 8, 2008
When I was a child, I remember a bumper-sticker that said: "Rugby players have funny-shaped balls." Maybe the time has come to unveil another, something along the lines of: "Army men bowl wrong 'uns." It was back in 1950-51 that a 35-year-old former jackaroo called Jack Iverson confounded an English line-up that included Len Hutton, Denis Compton and Cyril Washbrook. His unorthodox style fetched him 21 wickets at 15.23, though his late start meant that it would be the only series that he played.
More than half a century on, we've just seen Ajantha Mendis reduce a six-hitting Indian line-up to rubble on a batsman's paradise at Karachi. On the surface, the strapping Iverson and the far more slight Mendis are as different as bush tucker and crab curry, but if you dig deeper you'll find that both had army fatigues in common.
In the Complete Who's Who of Test cricketers, Christopher Martin-Jenkins gives us both Iverson's background and his unusual method. "At first, he bowled fastish, but while on army service in New Guinea during the Second World War he developed a peculiar method of spinning the ball, which he gripped in his right hand between his thumb and bent middle finger, using the bent finger as a spring to discharge 'the missile'," he writes. "Batsmen with experience of Iverson came to know that if the thumb pointed straight, it was a top-spinner. And if the thumb pointed to the leg side the ball would turn from the off, a peculiar wrong 'un bowled with the wrist over the ball instead of underneath it."
Mendis's contribution to the spin game is the carrom ball, and there are certainly echoes of what Iverson did. To bowl his doosra – his stock ball, if you can call it that given his variations, is the off-break – he places the index finger on the seam and the thumb underneath the ball. With the seam then pointing in the direction of the slip cordon, he keeps the middle finger folded on the stitching of the ball. Presumably, that middle finger is as strong as Miguel Indurain's heart was, because it allows him to give the ball a real flick to propel it at the batsman.
It was with one such delivery that he transformed the Asia Cup final. With Virender Sehwag running amok like a bull down Pamplona's streets, India had rattled off 76 in nine overs in pursuit of 274. Given Muttiah Muralitharan's dislike of the hard ball, it was to Mendis that Mahela Jayawardene turned, fully aware that the Indians had never faced him.
Sehwag, who had rampaged to 60, thought about giving the first ball a good old two-step and whack, but managed to restrain himself just in time. The handbrake didn't work the second time though, and Mendis's carrom ball darted away from him to leave Kumar Sangakkara with the simplest of stumpings. The others, epitomising the new breed of Indian batsman who doesn't get to play quality spin and is therefore as clueless as most occidentals against it, offered less than token resistance, with the dismissals of Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina especially embarrassing. Sri Lanka won by 100 runs.
The signs had been there days earlier, when Mendis flummoxed Mohammad Yousuf, Shoaib Malik and Misbah-ul-Haq, none of them soft touches against the turning ball. Kept away from the Indians before the final, he was as mesmerising on the day as Anil Kumble had been to the West Indians when he scalped 6 for 12 in the Hero Cup final all those years ago.
Kumble bemused you with pace and bounce, while Mendis's methods are rather more cloaked in mystery. Mahendra Singh Dhoni still appeared to be in a trance at the post-match briefing, where he said: "Most of our batsmen couldn't pick him. We had never played him before. We had only seen videos and you can visualise and all, but he was difficult to pick out there in the middle. We never had any real reply against him."
Iverson spawned a generation of imitators, the most successful being John Gleeson, who managed 93 wickets in his 29 Tests. Possessing greater variety than Iverson, Gleeson's problem, according to CMJ, was the Stuart MacGill-like tendency to bowl a four-ball every so often. So far, there has been no sign of that with Mendis, whose accuracy was as much a revelation as the mechanics behind his demon delivery.
In our age of slow-motion replays and endless video analysis, it's only a matter of time before the carrom ball is demystified. But according to Gleeson, he that follows the unorthodox path always has access to greater options. "The enormous advantage the bent finger Iverson-type grip gives a bowler is that if the batsman starts to detect it, he can revert to orthodox spin. His entire range of deliveries is doubled, and this gives him more chance of staying one step ahead of the batsman."
Sa'adi Thawfeeq, who profiled Mendis for Cricinfo after his debut series against West Indies, talked to Saman Hewavitharana, the Sri Lankan army coach who was as instrumental in Mendis's career as Ruwan Kalpage, who worked with him at the academy. "When he joined the Army he had only the off-break and leg-break," Hewavitharana said. "But on his own he started developing other deliveries at practice."
The coach isn't shy when asked what the future holds. Even a year ago, the idea of someone even becoming a pale facsimile of the supple-wristed Muralitharan would have been considered sacrilegious, but Hewavitharana reckons that Mendis could go on to scale similar heights. "When Muralitharan broke into international cricket he had only the off spinner and top spinner," he said. "Mendis has five varieties. The secret of Mendis' success is his strong fingers with which he grips and flicks the ball."
So far, his eight one-day international outings have brought him 20 wickets at 10.25. The Test debut must now be a formality, though it's probably fair to say that Messrs Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman will provide a far sterner test for the Mendis repertoire than Yuvraj and Raina did.
How will the Indians play him in the forthcoming Test series? Will they treat him as a slow bowler or a medium-pacer? Would it be better to play him off the pitch than from the hand? The slow-motion replays offer some clue, though it's easier said than done when you have a split-second to decide on a stroke. When he bowls the doosra, with the middle finger in flick mode, the other three fingers tend to be raised. That should serve as a visual clue, even though the batsman still has to be prepared for the ball to squirt off the surface after pitching. India's middle order is as technically gifted as they come, and the contest between them and the young pretender will be a fascinating one.
Jayawardene, who has admitted to being made a fool of in the nets, reckons that there's more to come, and it's not beyond Mendis to come up with even more befuddling variations. An obvious one would be a cricketing equivalent of baseball's knuckle ball. Alan Connolly, whose seam bowling accounted for 102 wickets in 29 Tests, is said to have bowled a few in his time, helped no doubt by his experiences as a baseball pitcher for Victoria during the winters.
Years ago Richie Benaud said: "There have been plenty of spin bowlers around for more than a hundred years but the four, for me, who have broken the mould and made batsmen think seriously about what was coming down the pitch at them, have been Bernard Bosanquet, Jack Iverson, John Gleeson and Shane Warne." A decade from now, we may have to add another name to the list, an army private from Moratuwa, just south of Colombo, who is beginning to make many think that rumours about the death of spin bowling are a gross exaggeration.
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