Lasith Malinga's childhood friend Sudath Lalintha remembers Malinga's first ever hard-ball game. They were playing in a casual inter-village match at the local ground. Lalintha was keeping wickets.

"The pace Lasi bowled at that day, hammoo!" Lalintha remembers. "Balls were passing me to leg, to off, over the top. I was getting scolded by everyone to give up the gloves if I couldn't do the job. Even the straight ones I barely had time to get up from my haunches and catch. The most I could do was throw my arm out and stop it with some part of the body. Sixty-six from extras itself. I still have the score in my diary.

"Then he bowled one at the wickets and you should have heard the sound. CHA-TAAAN! The off stump went flying. Kumar aiya - the batsman who got out - was laughing to himself on the way back because he didn't even see that ball. That was the start. That was Lasi's first leather-ball wicket."

From such beginnings, in the Rathgama village ground, its boundaries 30 metres from the Indian Ocean, began what we can say with some confidence now was a little revolution. Others had slung the ball before. But at the top level at least, no one had slung it this way. When he was playing club cricket, his team-mates had given Malinga the nickname daakaththa - the sickle. His arm came around flush with the horizon, and he reaped wickets in sheaves.

The vital component to Malinga's success is having identified early that the yorker was going to be key. Roundarm bowlers have a double advantage when it comes to bowling the yorker. Firstly, their delivery points tend to be so low that even if there is a slight error in length (i.e. it's either a low full toss, or in the slot), batters still tend to find it difficult to get under them. And two, if the ball is swinging, roundarm bowlers can swing the ball downwards, making their lengths incredibly difficult to judge.

Malinga's acolytes, like Matheesha Pathirana, are attempting to follow in his footsteps, but none have approached his level of skill Ishara S Kodikara / © AFP/Getty Images

This is why almost uniformly the small army of roundarm slingers Malinga has inspired favour the fuller lengths. In senior men's internationals there are at least two countries that have produced Malinga acolytes - Sri Lanka (Matheesha Pathirana and Nuwan Thushara), and Pakistan (Zaman Khan). There appear to be disciples in the lower levels too. Kugadas Mathulan, an 18-year-old from Jaffna, bowls round-arm. As does Athisayaraj Davidson, who plays in the Tamil Nadu Premier League. The Pakistan Super League, meanwhile, has seen plenty of Salman Irshad.

The second generation of roundarm slingers haven't quite blossomed yet. Some are adept at swinging the new ball (like Thushara), others are experts at the death (like Pathirana), but none have combined these virtues as Malinga did. None have played all three formats internationally, where Malinga took more than 100 wickets in Tests, ODIs, and T20Is. But Malinga already having blazed this trail makes the road smoother for those to follow, especially because he has been generous with advice. Jasprit Bumrah was just another unorthodox talent too. His relationship with Malinga at Mumbai Indians was vital in the early days, a key stop en route to becoming the best bowler in the world.

While Malinga himself insists that Tests were where he really improved his bowling, prevailing thought seems to be that roundarm bowlers should be spared the long-format workload to focus on T20s, to which their skill set is most suited. It's too early to tell where this revolution will take us. But for now, there is no one quite like the OG.

Andrew Fidel Fernando is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo. @afidelf

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

 

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