An unkempt stubble has distorted the eternally boyish looks of Mitchell Santner. He has shed his specs and nerdishness with it too. The uncomfortable comparisons with Daniel Vettori too has stopped. After his seven-wicket haul in Pune, he could assert that, nine years into his start-stop Test career, he is a man of his own.
When Santner’s name was listed in the team-sheet, it was misinterpreted as an act of desperation, a utility juggle, a tactic that was deemed counterproductive even before he faced his first ball or marked his run-up. But there are days when everything aligns — the nature of the pitch, the feel of the ball in his hands, the error of judgment batsmen make, the marginal decisions that go your way.
Square turners are not his type of pitches. His craft is more suited to those that turn a bit, with some pace and bite, and fertile to natural variations, where even he himself could predict the direction of the deviations. Those wickets where he could bring his gift of changing pace to devastating effect. It’s a skill he acquired playing white-ball cricket around the world. “On surfaces that don’t spin, you have to mix your pace up, control the flow of runs. The pace of the wicket dropped after a point and so I changed the pace up a lot to confuse batsmen. I tried to find the right speed. It changed as the game went on. I just tried to keep the speed to 90 kph,” he said.
When Santner, a medium-pacer converted to a spinner after Vettori seized his attention, burst forth he was quicker. But over time, he learned to modulate his pace. On Friday, he hit the 75 kph to 90kph band. He has slow-motioned every aspect of his bowling. He almost stutters into the crease, the load-up is a crawl, and he then stops rather than pauses before his round-arm release. In this he is an antithesis of the left-arm counterpart Ravindra Jadeja, who blitzes through his action.
Remodelling the action was his first step in his journey to redeem his Test career. “I felt I was getting too quick at the crease… I guess, a lot of white ball bowling,” Santner said in Sri Lanka.
“But I’ve gone the other way now and (I’m) trying to give it a rip again – a bit slower to the crease and try to get my momentum from the crease. That’s what I tried to do at the World Cup and there were some favourable pitches, which was nice, and that flowed into my red ball bowling,” he explained.
The advice of spin bowling coach Rangana Herath helped. “You know he was of all these, change of pace and angles, and he has been of immense help. Even in the series against Sri Lanka I was hitting the good areas and bowling well, even though I didn’t get the rewards,” he said.
There are more layers of nonconformity. He doesn’t impart too much of his body into the action, he doesn’t have the pivot that gnarled old-timers would insist. He doesn’t give much of an air, but the ball dips, thanks to a generous dose of over-spin and the ball drops a few centimetres shorter than where the batsmen anticipate. He doesn’t coax much drift into the right-handed batsmen, but manoeuvres the crease expertly to create angles, or to create the illusion of drift. The round-arm angle exaggerates the angle. Even when he goes wider of the crease, he ensures that the ball lands in similar areas. “I just tried to play with angles. Tried to vary it up. Just watched Washy [Washington Sundar] and that looked cool,” he said.
Control and direction — he bowled unbroken for 17.3 overs of unflagging intensity — coerced good fortune. Especially the wicket of Kohli. “It was more of a shock to get Kohli out like that. He doesn’t usually miss those. It was slightly slower through the air. I just tried to change it up a little bit, but usually, if you bowl those, they go for six,” he said. The Kohli wicket was just the icing on the cake of an incredible show of left-arm-spin subtlety. And the day he emerged from the shadows of his idol Vettori.
