“There’s no mystery spinner in the side,” asserted Rangana Herath, an impish smile playing on his lips, as if he wished to answer in the affirmative and slip in some intrigue before the Test series. Like Shane Warne routinely used to hype before Ashes, claiming he will unravel his latest fancily named delivery which seldom really arrived, or when it arrived never landed on the pitch. But here, Herath was just being plain truthful. “You see our side and you find it for yourself,” he added.
The genesis of the question was two-fold. First, and most obviously, it alludes to Sri Lanka’s fine tradition of unearthing spinners whose means and methods aren’t textbook-specific. Like the goggle-eyed contortionist Muttiah Muralitharan, who used more wrist (and eyes) than any other off-spinner ever. Or like the carrom-ball flicking sergeant Ajantha Mendis, who was indecipherable for most part of India’s trip here in 2008 and for most of their vaunted batsmen. Or like Tharindu Kaushal, dubbed the duplicate Murali, whose career waned after a re-modelled action. Or the left-arm spinner Lakshan Sandakan. There have been several other less storied mystery men, too, whose names did the rounds whenever a team arrived on these shores. A spinner with a bag of arcane trickery weaves a great narrative too — it did inspire Sri Lankan writer Snehan Karunathilake to pen a gripping fantasy of a dying journalist tracing a forgotten chinaman bowler who used to refuse him interviews.
The second inference of the question screamed of a blatant unfamiliarity, at least for the Indians, with the present crop of Lankan spinners, except Herath. But more than the assumed mystery of non-existent mystery men, Indians would have to be wary of these unfamiliar men with conventional tricks, led by a man who himself has nothing remotely mysterious about him.
One of his accomplices is 35-year-old off-spinner Dilruwan Perera — the fastest Sri Lankan to 50 Test wickets, surpassing a certain legend. He had the Australian in a manic tizzy last year, but is anything but peculiar. He is more in the Graeme Swann mould, classical in action and relying on the time-tested tricks of an offie, like flight and drift, besides subtle variations in pace and angles. Heck, he doesn’t even possess a doosra or a carrom ball, the requisites of a modern-day offie, or turn the ball prodigiously. Yet, with his humble, old-fashioned methods and a throwback action, he was sharp enough to rattle the Australians, who seemed stunned more by the lack of mystery about him than anything else, in Galle, where he picked 10 wickets.
He’s much like a right-handed Herath, relentlessly disciplined and continuously probing the batsman’s judgement. For nearly 10 years, Perera was earmarked as Murali’s successor, but due to the latter’s lengthy career and the selectors’ urge to unearth spinners of cryptic arts, he never made his Test debut until 2014. But three years on, after 79 wickets in 17 Tests, he seems to be compensating for the lost time in haste.
Like Perera had to wait for Murali’s exit, it seemed Malinda Pushpakumara, at 30 the youngest of the trio, had to hold on for an eternity for his Test debut. Though he’s not yet certain of achieving that in Galle, he too comes without any halo of mystery, but an impressive body of domestic work – 558 First-Class wickets at 19.58. So stunning has he been in the last five seasons that chief selector Sanath Jayasuriya considers him Herath’s heir. But Herath feels he might not have to wait that long. “If you take his First-Class career, he has taken more than 500 wickets. The stats say he is very good at his bowling. Whether I am retired or not, I am sure he is the second option as a left-arm spinner,” he says.
On the domestic circuit, Pushpakumara is considered trickier than Herath because be spins the ball prodigiously, which he did even at the nets on Tuesday, beating Kusal Mendis’ outside edge by a fair distance. Even his arm-ball tends to skid faster than Herath’s, though, unlike Herath, he is not a model of accuracy or precision.
It’s as ironic as it’s amusing when you think that Sri Lanka’s attack is led by three 30-something spinners without even a hint of anything unusual about them. It wasn’t meant to be like this. It was meant to be bustling young men with weird actions and weirder variations weaving a hypnotic web of deception. But Sri Lanka’s obsession with quirky men seem to have vanished – Sri Lanka as a land of mysterious twirlers is now a dated stereotype. But not the world’s obsession with such men. The only thing perhaps mysterious about Sri Lanka’s spinners might be how Herath, sneaking into his 40s, is still managing to bowl with the eagerness and sharpness of a 20-something.
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