The genius of freakishness

The Spaniard, on the other hand, might well have been challenging the bigger boys in Mallorca, hustling the local tennis court bullies off the court, then taking them on two at a time and still running them ragged until he was breaking his opponents’ games and their spirits.

On Sunday evening, the two brought out all they had on to Wimbledon’s sacred grass, putting up a show worthy of the gods.

At around the same time on Sunday evening, two seas away in Karachi, a third variety of sporting brilliance was making its presence felt. Genius born out of ignorance, perhaps; abilities honed by intuition and nothing else.

There was some perverse pleasure in watching Ajantha Mendis slipping and sliding past Team India’s confounded bats in the Asia Cup final. For a couple of reasons.

One, the balance of power has shifted so completely in favour of bludgeons that the slightest hint of equality has become a cause for celebration. At the end of a tournament where teams touched 300 ten times, a tournament where the bats did all the talking, it was hard not to smile as the ball finally got a few telling words in.

More importantly, it was a freak doing the damage.

While bowling for the Sri Lanka Army side, no one told Mendis that there are leg-spinners and off-spinners, and the two are not the same. No one told him that to turn the ball from leg to off, the wrist and fingers need to whip the ball out from a round-arm action. No one told him about the pivot at the time of delivery. The result: he now grips the ball between his forefinger and his ring finger, squeezing it out of his hands at the time of delivery, wondering himself, perhaps, which way the ball will go.

Mendis endearingly admits that he didn’t know he was any different until he got close to national reckoning. Much like Pakistan’s left-arm contortionist Sohail Tanvir, who says he had no idea he bowled off the wrong foot until he was picked for the national side and saw himself on television.

... contd.