Move over the doosra and also the flippers and zooters — spin bowling’s newest variation happens to be the ‘carrom ball’. Don’t try this at home, but here’s basically how it’s done: The ball is held between the thumb, forefinger and the middle finger, and instead of a regular release, the ball is supposed to be squeezed out of the fingers. What follows could be an off-break, a leg-break, a googly, a zooter... ask Ajanta Mendis. Actually, ask batsmen who have faced him in the seven one-dayers he’s played.

Apart from the ‘carrom ball’, Mendis is also a handy practitioner of such dull skills as leg-spin and off-spin, all of which he manages to pull off with remarkable accuracy.

Did he pick up his tricks watching Muttiah Muralitharan bowl, as you would expect? Or was it Shane Warne who the bowler looked up to? The bowler says it was just a lack of expert advice during the years he spent playing II Division cricket in the Lankan army. “It comes naturally to me. Nobody pointed it out to me until I came close to being selected for the national team,” he says.

Right now, his captain is having a separate set of problems with him — how do you set the field for a bowler who really doesn’t have a stock ball? “Did he bowl leg-spin today?” Jayawardene asked in jest after Sri Lanka’s victory over Bangladesh on Monday.

While Jayawardene insists that he and his team “encourage cricketers to be as natural as possible”, they want Mendis to get more comfortable in his position as one of Lanka’s prominent bowling options before he moves up to the next level. For this reason alone, there’s a mention time and again of them wanting Mendis to figure out what his ‘stock ball’ is. “The good thing is our opponents never understand the language (Sinhalese) we speak. What we’ve asked Mendis to do for now is let us know what he’s going to bowl in a particular situation,” says Jayawardene.

... contd.