"You can only do three things: spin from the leg, spin from the off, or go in straight. The ball can't disappear or explode."

These words, attributed to John Gleeson, the Australian mystery spinner of the 1960s and '70s, are broadly true, but sometimes someone bowls a ball so confounding that it may as well have exploded. R Ashwin bowled one to Glenn Phillips recently, a carrom ball that pitched outside leg stump and hit off, and left everyone wondering how a ball deriving its fizz from the flick of a finger could have turned quite so much.

There has been a wider explosion of the carrom ball too, in the decade and a half since Ajantha Mendis popularised it, and every second squad in every T20 league seems to include someone who bowls it.

But who invented it?

The correct answer, of course, is that no one knows. Give a child a ball and they will find ways to manipulate its behaviour, and bowlers at all levels have for hundreds of years befuddled batters with deliveries that looked like one thing and turned out to be another.

But the bowler who was first noticed bowling it at the top level can be identified with reasonable certainty. It isn't clear exactly how Sonny Ramadhin gripped and spun his offbreaks and legbreaks, but we know that his Australian contemporary Jack Iverson held the ball between his thumb and bent middle finger and flicked it out of his hand. This came to define him to such an extent that his ESPNcricinfo profile photograph isn't of his face but his bowling grip.

That grip was - and could perhaps only have been - the product of a highly unusual journey into top-level cricket. Iverson had a lifelong fascination for flicking and spinning table-tennis balls out of his massive hands, but bowled medium pace in the little organised cricket that he played in his youth. It wasn't until his World War II service years that he tried to replicate what he called his "oddities" with a cricket ball, in regimental matches in Papua New Guinea.

He trialled at his local club at 31, broke into Victoria's XI at 34, and topped the Sheffield Shield wicket charts in his debut season. At 35 he was a Test cricketer, starring in Australia's 4-1 Ashes victory with 21 wickets at 15.23.

It was some start, and some end; those five appearances made up all of his Test career.

Ajantha Mendis and his carrom ball were objects of fascination when he emerged in 2008 Lakruwan Wanniarachchi / © AFP/Getty Images

Iverson never felt secure in a cricketer's identity. Having come into the sport in such an unorthodox manner, he felt himself an interloper among his team-mates, and lacking the ironclad self-belief of players grizzled by early failure, took bad days to heart. And at a time when cricket was a largely amateur pursuit, he told himself it was a temporary detour from the real-estate business he felt duty-bound to take over from his father.

He announced his retirement at the end of that Ashes series but vacillated on that decision, returning to Shield cricket and bowling well enough to fan hopes of a Test comeback against South Africa in 1952-53, only to douse them at the last moment. He eventually signed off from first-class cricket the following season, but continued playing club cricket into his early 50s.

By then, Iverson's health was beginning to deteriorate, and he suffered bouts of depression that may have been brought on, or magnified, by cerebral arteriosclerosis. He died by suicide in October 1973, aged 58.

"As I traced his fugitive figure, I often learned more than I had expected, but always less than I wanted," Gideon Haigh writes in Mystery Spinner, his haunting excavation of Iverson's life. Among all the questions the book leaves you with, however, is one definitive answer. Mystery Spinner came out nine years before Mendis' arrival gave cricket a new lexicon for describing mystery spin, and includes no mention of the word "carrom", but the book's descriptions of Iverson's bowling make clear that he bowled it.

He used it differently to modern practitioners, though, relying on a wrong'un delivered with that bent-middle-finger grip as his stock ball, and bowling what we now call the carrom ball as a variation. Something like a significantly taller Mendis, then, in reverse. To read of Cyril Washbrook "groping sightlessly" at Iverson's wrong'un at the SCG in 1951 is to picture VVS Laxman bowled through the gate by Mendis at the SSC 57 years later.

Here's how far ahead of his time Iverson was: the ball he most likely introduced to Test cricket gained a name half a century after he played it. But there had been one previous name for it. When Gleeson, quoted at the top of this page, burst onto the scene, the New South Wales batter Barry Rothwell is reported to have made this remark: "This bloke's bowling Iversons."

Karthik Krishnaswamy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

 

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