Team India may have failed miserably in their attempts to decode Ajantha Mendis and his ‘carrom ball’ last night, but not so long ago, there was one batsman who was tonking the Sri Lankan spinner out of the Eden Gardens with ease. The extremely former India all-rounder and current Bengal skipper Laxmi Ratan Shukla took special fancy for his Kolkata Knight Riders team mate during the Indian Premier League.

The Lankan had arrived in Kolkata with a special reputation, for a bargain price, after a successful debut in the West Indies, but Shukla, who played a couple of crucial knocks in the Knight Riders’s stuttering campaign, hit him for six or seven big ones in the first net session Mendis was part of, and walked out to applause from the likes of John Buchanan for the simplicity with which he had taken Mendis apart.

“There was an optional practice for our team that I didn’t go for. At night, my team mates told me that there was a good bowler who had arrived from Sri Lanka. They told me that he had a great variety and that he was someone special.

The fact that it was only a net session could have made a difference, but Shukla insists he didn’t find the going too tough. “I was very curious and wanted to play him in the nets very next day. When he bowled to me, I played defensively to his first two balls. Because I had heard a lot about him, I focused a lot more on his hand when he was releasing the ball. Next thing I knew, I could easily tell which one was going to cut out and which was going to zip in. He tried all his variations, but I was picking the straighter one as well,” he says.

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