We admire players who do something different,” says Mahela Jayawardene, Sri
Lanka’s former captain. You can say that again. Sri Lankan cricket seems to
encourage invention and innovation to a point where it is almost
unconventional to be conventional. Jayawardene is that unique character: a
solid, orthodox batsman and, until recently, level-headed leader in a team
of mavericks, a school of science and artistry that is taking the World
Twenty20 tournament by storm in a way that their predecessors did so
unexpectedly and joyously in the 50-over World Cup of 1996.
The spirit of that tub-thumping campaign is retained in the current squad with
the ageless presence of Sanath Jayasuriya and Muttiah Muralitharan. Their
longevity is remarkable but so is their Madonna-like capacity for
reinvention. When Jayasuriya played a reverse sweep against West Indies last
week, Ian Chappell, the former Australia captain turned TV commentator,
claimed he had never seen Jayasuriya play such a shot, essentially because
he had never needed to.
Jayasuriya, who turns 40 at the end of the month, has favoured the cut shot
over the years, slicing and dicing bowling attacks who gave him the
slightest width. It was he and Romesh Kaluwitharana who broke the mould back
in 1996, “teeing off” in the early overs to take advantage of fielding
restrictions. England were infamously demolished in the quarter-finals,
Jayasuriya’s contribution was 82 off 44 balls.
Now his “junior” partner is the 32-year-old Tillakaratne Dilshan, who has
patented a shot that involves shovelling or scooping a straight, good-length
ball directly over the wicketkeeper’s head. Plenty of batsmen have developed
the flick over the shoulder to take advantage of a short fine leg but none
can match Dilshan’s perpendicular perfection. “I think I’ve only missed it
once,” says Dilshan. “Playing the shot means the bowler has to think twice
about where he is going to bowl the next ball.” Dilshan also credits his
stint with the Delhi Daredevils in the Indian Premier League as vital to his
cricketing education.
Muralitharan, the other survivor from 1996, is something of a liability in the
field but his relentless accuracy and hint of mystery means he remains a
vital cog in Sri Lanka’s inventive bowling line-up. While his apprentice
Ajantha Mendis went for eight an over against Pakistan on Friday, Murali was
as on the money just as Pakistan threatened to make a game of it.
When Twenty20 burst into the English cricketing consciousness in 2003, nobody
anticipated the role of spin bowlers. Yet while quicker bowlers, such as
Brett Lee, disappear to all parts, allowing the batsmen to feed off the pace
of the ball, the slow men are hard to get away. And the clever slow men —
like Mendis — can be impossible, as the Australians found to their bemused
cost.
Mendis, 24, follows in the tradition of Australian spinners Jack Iverson, who
took 21 wickets in the 1950-51 Ashes, and John Gleeson. These are the
“flickers”, bowlers who deliver the ball not with wrist or finger spin but
by finger-flicking propulsion. Mendis’s killer delivery, which he flicks
with the middle finger, is know as the “carrom” ball, after a billiards-type
game that involves flicking disks into pockets.
Jayawardene first saw Mendis while he was playing for the Army and appeared at
a Sri Lankan net session. “Tom had a look and said, ‘This guy’s
interesting’. Everyone was smiling because we hadn’t seen someone like that.
He was very raw and didn’t have control but after a year he understood what
he was doing and we realised he could be a thinking bowler.”
Mendis’ moment came less than a year ago when he took six for 13 against India
in the final of the one-day Asia Cup. He made his Test debut later that
month, also against India, and after Rahul Dravid became his first victim,
he took 26 wickets at 18 in three Tests.
His stats are frightening: 34 Test wickets at 23; 64 one-day wickets at 13; 16
Twenty20 international wickets at seven and 155 first-class wickets at 16.
Strike-rates and economy-rates are all more than acceptable. In the age of
the batsman, these are throwback numbers, the sort of figures one would
expect from the days of uncovered pitches.
Beyond Mendis and Murali, there is Lasith “Slinger” Malinga, the wild-haired
fast man whose bowling arm is disconcertingly hidden behind the umpire until
a 90mph ballistic is released with often devastating consequences.
Like Jayasuriya, these men are products not of a system but of a search, a
widening of the net, championed by Arjuna Ranatunga, the World Cup-winning
captain, to find players from beyond the elite, Colombo-based private
schools.
If Sri Lanka have a weakness, one is tempted to say their fielding, yet in
that discipline they have pushed the boundaries — literally. Angelo Mathews
tried to catch West Indies’ Ramnaresh Sarwan on the long-on boundary, failed
but kept the ball airborne as he went over the boundary. Seeing the ball was
still in the air, he leapt and palmed it back into play before re-entering
the field and returning the ball. His remarkable athleticism prompted an
announcement from MCC, cricket’s law-makers, to confirm that his actions
were legal because he was off the ground when he pushed the ball back in.
An expected victory over Ireland today will put Sri Lanka one step closer to a
Lord’s final that six months ago in Lahore would have seemed unimportant and
incomprehensible. After those terrifying attacks and the turmoil of their
own country, Sri Lanka are surely the neutrals’ favourite to show the home
of cricket next Sunday how the game should be really played.
- John Stern is editor of The Wisden Cricketer
How do you explain the magic of Mendis?
- While teammate Muttiah Muralitharan is credited with developing the doosra —
an offspinner’s delivery that goes ‘the wrong way’ — Ajantha Mendis has been
the pioneer of what has become known as the ‘Carrom Ball’. The Australian
spinner Jack Iverson is believed to have first tried this
- The ball is held between the thumb, forefinger and the middle finger.
Instead of being released through movement of the wrist and hand in an
orthodox manner, the ball is flicked out by the fingers, in a way resembling
someone playing the popular Asian tabletop game Carrom
- The bowler can spin the ball either way with little discernible difference
in his action to the batsman. If the centre finger is gripped towards the
leg side, the ball spins from leg to offside and vice-versa
- Mendis has so far claimed 34 victims in just six Tests and has looked a
threat in the World Twenty20, particularly against Australia, whose captain,
Ricky Ponting, he dismissed.
