Ian Chappell: 'From hearing what Kumar Sangakkara said about Mendis, and seeing his accuracy, you tend to think that he could be around for quite some time' © AFP

Tony Greig: Ajantha Mendis's match-winning 6 for 13 in the final of the Asia Cup announced the arrival of another "mystery spinner". India's captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni said after the final that the Indian batsmen "couldn't read him at all". Mendis is not the first bowler to develop a bowling style that has confused batsmen. The history of cricket is filled with bowlers like Jack Iverson in the early 1950s to Muttiah Muralitharan - currently the leading wicket-taker in Test cricket - who have bewildered batsmen with their unusual deliveries. Similarly, there have been batsmen like Sanath Jayasuriya, Virender Sehwag and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who have not exactly followed conventional batting protocol but have been just as successful as their more traditional counterparts.

How do such unorthodox cricketers develop? What is it in their learning environment that persuades them to defy traditional methods? To examine these questions I have with me two superb cricketers of yesteryear: Ian Chappell, and "Whispering Death" himself, Michael Holding.

Can I start with you Michael? A few general thoughts on cricketers who defy the traditional norms with unorthodox methods?

Michael Holding: Well, I think what really encourages these cricketers to be able to do that, Tony, is that when they are young and they have these unorthodox methods, people don't try to make radical changes in their game. Most of these cricketers who do come along and do well with these unorthodox methods, in batting and bowling, you find they come from areas or regions in the world where they are not over-coached.

When you think of someone like Colin Croft - who I played with - who had that weird bowling action of stepping so wide and doing what he did, I think under most other regimes he would have been coached into being a little bit more normal and perhaps that would have destroyed him and he wouldn't have been as successful. That, in my opinion, is one of the main ingredients for why these guys have been able to develop with these unorthodox methods and still do well: because they are not discouraged.

TG: Ian do you concur with those views?

Ian Chappell: Yes. I played a lot of cricket with John Gleeson, who was described as a folded-finger spinner. I would describe Mendis in a similar way, based on the little bit that I have seen of him. Gleeson came from the country. In those days there weren't a lot of coaches around anywhere and they were a lot fewer in the country than in the cities. Gleeson played a lot of cricket before he developed that method - he was actually a wicketkeeper-batsman. Somehow while messing around in the nets - I think originally with a table tennis ball - he developed a method and then he tried it with the cricket ball and was quite successful. He was out in the bush, with no coaching, and he developed his own method.

TG: Well, there has been a bit of comparison between Mendis and Jack Iverson. None of us played again Iverson - he didn't play very many Tests. But he certainly played against England and in those few Tests that he played, he caused absolute havoc.

IC: A lot of the players we have just talked about had reasonably long and successful careers - and if you're talking about Murali, it is an extremely successful career. But even Gleeson, for instance, took nearly 100 Test wickets.

The problem for Iverson was that he had a short career and he didn't have any cricketing background. He developed this method late in his life. He hadn't played a lot of cricket; he suddenly developed this method and had a lot of success and then came into international cricket. Although he was successful, he didn't have anything to fall back on.

Actually it was New South Wales who destroyed him. This was just before Australia were going to England in 1953, and I think - from memory - it was Keith Miller and Arthur Morris who decided that they were going to come down the pitch to him and attack him. They did that in a Shield game and they hit him out of the attack. And because he had no background in the game of cricket, he had nothing to fall back on and so he virtually retired from the game. Richie Benaud, who went on that tour of England, has said - and I have heard him say it a number of times - "If Iverson had gone on that tour, Australia would have won the series against England". But he [Iverson] was actually destroyed by a couple of Australian players.

Mendis is a very accurate bowler. I was listening to the interview with Kumar Sangakkara after the final - after he [Mendis] destroyed India in the final - and Sangakkara said a couple of interesting things. He said, "I've batted against this guy a lot. One: he is very accurate, and two: he knows what he is doing. I've batted against him in the nets and in matches and he has got a very good bowling brain." So from hearing that and seeing his accuracy, you tend to think that he could be around for quite some time.

TG: The other guy who is mentioned in this "mystery spinner" category is a fellow West Indian - Sonny Ramadhin. Mikey, have you heard any stories about him? How hard was he to play?

MH: Yes, I heard a lot of stories about Ramadhin and it was certainly very difficult to detect exactly what he was bowling. Ramadhin bowled with his sleeves down; with those baggy sleeves and his arms and his wrist and everything else flopping around. People could hardly ever detect and read exactly what delivery was coming at them. I never saw him, of course, I only heard people talk about him. Jackie Hendricks, who kept wicket to Ramadhin, said that it was difficult even for him to detect exactly what was happening.

But again, if Ramadhin had developed his game from where there was a lot of coaching, how would someone have coached someone like him? Even coaches could not have coached someone as unorthodox as Ramadhin or Murali because they don't know it themselves. So how do you coach something that you don't know? It is good that they were able to develop these traits without anyone interfering.

TG: Yes, it is true. I stood at slip to Ramadhin after he had retired from the game and I must say that I found it extremely difficult. But that is not saying much because South Africans tend to find it difficult whenever anyone does anything like Ramadhin or Gleeson, who caused chaos in South Africa as well.

(laughter)

Ian, did you see Ramadhin at all or did you hear anything about him?

IC: No, I didn't play against him but I heard a lot about him. I actually once had dinner one night in Jamaica with his bowling partner - Alf Valentine. I had a very enjoyable dinner. I spoke a lot about Ramadhin with him and he talked about how a lot of batsmen thought it was an offbreak when his wrist came over and instead it went the other way. Valentine chuckled about it and said, "It used to help me because while they were trying to work him out, I used to pick up some wickets at the other end."

I mean, if you look back at that Test where England apparently kicked him to death just using the pad, he bowled a hell of a lot of overs, but he bowled them very accurately.

Once again we get back to the point of having some sort of a [cricket] background. Tony, you have asked the question: how would somebody coach them? I think the important thing for the guys themselves is that because nobody else knows much about what they are doing, they are left to their own devices. What they then do is, they work out their own game, which is very important. When you have to work out your own game, what it also does is that it makes you mentally strong. If you get to the top level, you can handle it. The reason why, as I said before that Iverson couldn't, was because he had no cricketing background.

TG: Yes, that is a fair comment. We tend to see more unorthodox cricketers coming from places like Sri Lanka, Pakistan or West Indies. Is there something in the learning environment in these countries that encourages such players? For example, Sri Lanka's captain, Mahela Jayawardene, recently commented on how Sri Lankan cricket allows players to follow their natural game without messing with their technique. Ian?

IC: Well, having watched a bit of cricket outside the Galle Face Hotel there in Colombo, in pretty rough conditions, I watched guys charge in and bowl fast with batsmen trying to handle it. I thought to myself: what a great way to learn cricket. You are learning to survive but you also realise that because it is a game of cricket, you have to score some runs.

	Battle of the wrong-footed: Max Walker dismisses Mike Procter in a World Series Cricket game © Cricinfo Ltd

I remember when Sir Garry Sobers played with South Australia - obviously I had an opportunity to talk with him regularly - he told me that he learnt to play cricket with a taped rock, because they didn't have the money for a cricket ball, and a bit of wood - they probably pulled a paling off the fence. He said, ' "We played on rutted roads. The ball was jumping around at all sorts of crazy angles and you knew if it hit you, it would hurt. So you learnt how to hit the ball with this piece of wood and not let the ball hit you." People used to laugh about Sobers not batting with a thigh pad on, but he always said that he didn't really need it because this was how he learnt how to play.

Pakistan has been very similar. They play their cricket in the streets and in paddocks. In the past, in the West Indies it was the same. In some ways it is not a bad way to learn your cricket. Over the years I have come to the conclusion that if you have a good coach, that is fine. But if you have a bad coach, you are better off having no coach at all, learning the game by yourself.

Perhaps because young guys from Sri Lanka and Pakistan and West Indies are learning in this atmosphere, it encourages them to be individuals.

TG: Mikey you have first-hand experience of what Ian just said, especially in the West Indies. He also made a point about the over-coaching - the wrong type of coaching. What is it about the West Indies that lends itself to the development of unorthodox cricketers?

MH: Well, it used to, Tony. I'm not too sure that you get much free-for-all cricket now. I think it is much more organised now because there are lesser areas for kids to play; lesser open spaces now, with buildings going up for schools and houses and shopping centres. But when I was a young man growing up, any open space that we had - even sometimes on the road as we didn't have that many cars passing by - we could play. As Ian was just saying, even on rutted roads, with potholes and that sort of thing. So the ball would do anything. Even if you had a park, we never had groundsmen who would go and prepare pitches at any high standard. Whatever there was, you played on it.

So the ball would do anything and you learnt to do everything. If you were a batsman, you had to bowl someone out to get to bat. So you had to do some form of bowling or you had to do a fantastic bit of fielding or catching to get a chance to bat. If you were a bowler, when it was your turn to bat, you couldn't be sweating all day to try and get to bat and then have somebody bowl you out immediately.

So you tried to do everything and you tried to learn all the aspects of the game. But I think that is dying in the Caribbean these days, but that was the best training ever. Free for all, everyone involved, with everyone trying to do all aspects of the game, and of course with very little coaching. You had some senior guys around who knew the basics of the game and they would try to help you in the game. But no one would come to you and take the bat away from you and tell you that your elbow should be pointing to the sky, that your grip should be like this. You did what was comfortable and as time went on, you made slight adjustments in your game. But if you have been successful, the more successful you were with whatever you were doing; it was less likely that people would interfere with what you were doing. That is how we grew up as youngsters in the Caribbean.

TG: Wonderful way to grow up.

Let us just stay with the spinners for a while. Not long ago we saw Saqlain Mushtaq invent the doosra - that is the offspinning action where the ball goes like a legspinner. That was a real eye-opener for me when I first saw that and I kept thinking that it must be some sort of an arm ball. But since then we have seen Murali and others develop it. That has been quite a significant development in terms of "mystery spin". Ian?

IC: Well, yes and no. I mean, if you take Saqlain, who is regarded as the inventor of the doosra, I think it ruined his career. I think it wrecked him as a bowler and I thought he was a very fine offspin bowler. But he fell in love with this other delivery and neglected his really good offbreak.

The doosra has got to have a few advantages. Probably the immediate one that comes to mind is when you're bowling at left-handed batsmen rather than right-handed batsmen. As a right-handed batsman - and bear in mind that I didn't face anybody who bowled in this manner, although I faced a lot of decent offspinners - I would prefer to face the guy bowling the doosra - because he has to change his line, particularly if he is coming from over the wicket, and that would give you a bit of a hint. Whereas as a batsman facing an old-time offie - who pitches the ball just outside off stump, trying to turn the ball back and hit the top of off stump, and who has the one that went straight on - half the time you wouldn't know if the ball would go straight on or whether it would turn. To me, that was a very difficult one to pick. A guy who used it a lot and comes to mind immediately is Ray Illingworth. Now Ray wasn't the greatest offspinner around but I thought he had a very good one that went straight on. I would rather face a Saqlain-type of bowler than him.

A left-handed batsman - because Saqlain can confuse you and bring one back into you and create some lbw opportunities - might tell you something exactly the opposite.

TG: Well, what about Murali then, Michael? He is probably the most talked about of all. He has an extraordinary wrist action; and an extraordinary shoulder action, almost as if he is double-jointed. He has all these wickets. As Ian said, he bowls too much over the wicket but has started to bowl more around the wicket now. He is very effective ...

MH: Yes he is very effective. But the fact that he started to go more around the wicket now, has made him even more effective. As Ian was saying, they have to change their line when they continue to bowl their doosras and offspinners if they are bowling over the wicket. If you are getting the ball to go in both directions from over the wicket to a right hander, you definitely have to change your line, but it is a deliberate change.

I certainly agree with Ian that Saqlain got carried away with his doosra. He was so excited about the doosra that he was thinking more about that than about the offspinner. When he was bowling mainly offbreaks, he was more successful than when he developed his doosra and got carried away by it.

Murali spins it a lot. No one knows exactly what is happening with each delivery because of his wrist action and because sometimes he flicks the ball out of the back of his hand or over the top of his fingers. He is obviously a little bit different from Saqlain, who was a lot more obvious when he bowled each delivery - and then the doosras were a little bit different. Murali can bowl so many different deliveries and it is pretty difficult for the batsman to detect what is coming. That is why he is so successful. But he is even more successful when he is bowling to right-handers and bowls around the wicket.

TG: That is right. Any others you would like to throw in? What about [BS] Chandrasekhar?

IC: He was a legspinner who was very quick through the air. I think it was actually the withered arm that he bowled with.

TG: Yes, it was.

IC: But I didn't look upon him as unorthodox. I just looked upon him as a very accurate, very fast legspinner who was very difficult to combat. His wrong'un was very effective, particularly in Australia, because he got a lot more bounce with it. When he had a bat-pad and a leg-gully, if you weren't picking it - or even if you were picking it - that extra bounce at his pace got him the wickets. He probably wasn't quite as quick as Derek Underwood but he was up around that pace. For the younger people listening, he was around Anil Kumble's pace. When I say Kumble's pace, I mean he was Kumble's pace when Kumble bowls his quickest delivery, and that was pretty much the pace that Chandra bowled all his deliveries. The wrong'un obviously wasn't quite as quick because coming out of the back of the hand it had to have a bit more trajectory. But he got a lot of bounce with it in Australia.

I never thought of him as unorthodox. I always thought of him as a legspinner - a very quick one.

TG: Did you have trouble with him, Mikey?

MH: Well, I would have trouble with anyone, Greigy. (laughter)

IC: Mikey had a lot of trouble with legspinners, Greigy. You should ask him about it someday. (laughter)

MH: I played my first Test series against India in 1976 in the Caribbean. The pitches in the Caribbean didn't spin as much but Chandra was always a difficult man. I can remember all the top West Indian batsmen having problems against him.

I agree with Ian that he wasn't really the sort of unorthodox bowler that these guys are today. He was awkward and he looked a little bit different because of his withered arm but most of his deliveries were pretty normal deliveries.

	Michael Holding: 'Shivnarine Chanderpaul has been very successful with his stance. He has been successful with his unorthodoxy' © DigicelCricket.com

TG: My history is not as good as yours, Ian, not by a long stretch, but the other mystery ball, I suppose, has got to be the flipper. I read somewhere that Clarrie Grimmett was the first to bowl it, then it was Bruce Dooland and then he taught it to Richie Benaud, and then of course we saw Shane Warne, with the help of TV, almost make the flipper a backyard ball...

IC: Yes, but there is a lot of rubbish talked about the flipper. You are quite right: what I have heard is that Grimmett developed it and because there was a clicking of his fingers, batsmen started to pick it. But Clarrie wasn't called "The Fox" for no good reason. Once he realised that, he started clicking the fingers of his left hand as he delivered the ball, and he obviously wasn't making the click when he bowled the flipper. So he outsmarted a lot of batsmen that way.

There is a fair chance that Dooland then learnt it from Grimmett, because Dooland played cricket for South Australia and Grimmett too played most of his cricket for South Australia and then continued to live there. Dooland then taught it to Benaud.

A lot of the guys that I have spoken to, talk very highly about Abdul Qadir's f;lipper.

My point with the flipper is that it was always regarded - certainly when I played - as a ball to get nine, ten and Jack out with, not proper batsmen. You always felt that if you didn't get a top-order batsman out with it, the first time he saw it, then you weren't going to get him out with it again. The flipper is so different: it comes from under the wrist, whereas the legspinner comes from over the wrist, so if you aren't seeing it, as a batsman, I don't know what you are looking at.

The idea with most bowlers was to pitch the flipper a bit short so that you would get the batsman trying to play the pull shot and hopefully it would hurry on and get them lbw or bowled. But where Warne was different and was really clever was that he pitched his flipper up a little more and tried to get the batsman lbw on the front foot to it. He had quite a lot of success with that in the early days. Once he had his injuries, then he really struggled with the flipper.

TG: Mikey, lets move onto the fast men. I suppose that the guys who are different, are the guys who are the slingers and the guys who bowl off the wrong foot. Can we start with the slingers? The ones who come to mind now are Lasith Malinga and Shaun Tait. Any thoughts on them?

MH: They are different and a little bit awkward to face. Some slingers have higher arm actions than others and some are really very low. Malinga has created some problems for batsmen because his right arm is so low that he delivers the ball from in front of the umpire's chest. I know that the batsmen have asked the umpires to remove their dark ties from their chests and throw it over their shoulders so that they can pick up the ball off the umpire's white shirt. That is just out of the world: for someone to bowl a ball with that awkward an angle and action and still be effective requires a lot of control and knowhow.

If you just think about it, it's easy for a bowler whose right arm comes over the top to vary his length because it just depends on where he releases the ball: if he wants it to be full he will release it early, if he wants it short he will release it late. But when the arm comes side-on, if you release it too early it will go long way down the leg side, and if you release it too late, it will go way outside the off stump. If you have got to be accurate, you have got to be very good with your release. You have to release it perfectly each time. It is not easy to do so. If the bowler who slings doesn't get his release perfectly right each time, he will be flying all over the place. We have seen it in some bowlers - not every slinger has got to the highest level because they don't have the control. So if a slinger gets to the highest level and is successful, like Malinga, that means you know what you are doing and you are doing it well.

TG: Ian, what about the guys who bowled off the wrong foot? Mike Procter was one such guy and you played against him a lot. He swung the ball a lot. Are they that different?

IC: Yes, they are very awkward when you come up against them. As with all of these guys, it depends on how well they bowl. They can get by on being a bit of a mystery for a little while, but to survive long-term, they have to be good.

Max Walker was another guy who bowled off the wrong foot during my time but Prockie was quicker than Walker. Prockie used to swing the ball quite late into the right-handed batsmen and then he had the ability every now and again to get one to go straight or even swing away off the seam. Prockie was quite awkward because he was quite sharp.

The guy that I would liken Procter to is Sohail Tanvir of Pakistan. Tanvir is a left-armer, but he reminds me of Prockie because he gets the ball to swing at times, and when it does go it seems to go quite late. The problem for him bowling to right-handers is that his natural swing seems to be away from the right hander and what you want as a left-arm bowler is for your natural swing to be into the right-hander and then just angle the ball across the right hander. I think swinging it away from the right-hander isn't that helpful.

But Tanvir has been very successful and just watching him during this recent Asia Cup and listening to him talk about his cricket, it seems that he has worked hard on his batting - he got a very good half-century during that tournament - and he talked about wanting to be an allrounder. So what you've got is a guy who is a bit unorthodox, but he isn't just relying on that to provide him a long career; he is working on his game of cricket. So you look at a player like that and think that there is a fair chance that he is going to succeed.

TG: Michael, anybody you would like to mention in this category? What about Malcolm Marshall? Was he slightly late with the front leg?

MH: Not really. Malcolm was fairly orthodox but he was unlike a typical fast bowler in that he didn't slam his front foot down on the crease. He pretty much raced through the crease with his delivery and that was perhaps the only difference that I would make between him and most of the other fast bowlers. He wasn't a lumbering fast bowler who made a big print with his front foot, but I wouldn't say that he was unorthodox.

An unorthodox bowler who I bowled with, who wasn't a slinger and who didn't bowl off the wrong foot, was Croft. I cannot remember him bowling one delivery when his front foot was inside the box. But apart from Croft, the unorthodox bowlers that we had weren't really fast bowlers. They were more the slow bowlers than anything else.

TG: Just to finish then, it seems to me that most of the unorthodoxy comes from bowlers. But when it comes to batting, we see some strange stances. Any names that come to mind? West Indies have got Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who has a very open stance, and he moves around a lot. He is a little different...

MH: The first person who I came across with a very unorthodox stance - just that he wasn't very successful at it - was Peter Willey from England. He had a very open and unorthodox stance. Chanderpaul has been very successful with his stance. That is the type of cricketer that you have to talk about more - one that has been very successful with their unorthodoxy. Chanderpaul has been playing so well and has got so many runs with his stance.

It has got worse over the years. When he first started off, it wasn't that bad. He has opened up even more now and is even more successful. How can you explain something like that? It is matter of accepting that this is the way this man bats and if it works for him, why try and change it?

TG: Ian, what about batsmen with an unorthodox technique? One that springs to my mind in Alan Knott from England. We know that he was a wicketkeeper but he was also a pretty effective batsman...

IC: We always considered Knotty a very dangerous player. His defence was solid and it was based on what we in Australia call "French cricket". He had so many shots and he could score runs off the best of bowlers so that made him a very awkward customer for the opposing captain. He was difficult at times to place fields for. So we always considered him a dangerous player who was slightly unorthodox.

But I think with most players and particularly with batsmen, they might be unorthodox with their stance or grip but there are some basic things that you have to do to be successful as a batsman. With the modern technology of Ultra Slow Motion, you will find that if you pick 20 different batsmen from different eras, or who look different when you are watching from the boundary, if you slowed it down at one particular point, you would find that they were doing pretty much similar things. In essence, you can't do it incorrectly and be successful for a long period of time. You think of unorthodoxy more in a batsman than in a bowler because you look at a batsman and say that he's got an unorthodox stance but you don't necessarily think of him as unorthodox.

When I was a young bloke, I read about Bradman's unorthodoxy. My opinion about batting technique is that it is the ability to stop the good ball. If you can stop the good ball and score off the others, then as far as I am concerned your technique is fine.

TG: Just to finish then, a bit of advice for any young cricketer who is a bit unorthodox? How should he go about his career?

IC: The best advice you can give him - if he has developed his technique out in the bush or in the backyard, away from coaches, and a coach comes along - is to repeat the advice that I heard Bill O'Reilly hand out many years ago: "Son, if you see a coach coming, run a 100 miles."

(laughter)

But just to get a bit serious on the subject - that type of player probably needs someone who knows his game fairly well, who he can go to and talk to about it. The guy shouldn't try and change his method, he should try and advise him. I think that's the sort of person that most young cricketers need.

MH:I agree with Ian. My opinion in that regard is that people looking to change youngsters shouldn't be doing that. They should be trying to get the best out of them for what they have got.

TG: That brings us to the end of this Round Table. Thank you very much for your views.