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.
Source : Times Online
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