Massive turn gives Lakshan Sandakan a memorable wicket
It’s a delivery Shane Warne would have been proud of.
Sure, Lakshan Sandakan is a left-armer but the way he spun the ball back so sharply to clean bowl a flabbergasted Joe Burns sent minds racing back to the best of Shane Warne.
Not necessarily the famous ‘Gatting ball’ during the 1993 Ashes series, but certainly Warne’s massive turners that dismissed left-handers Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Andrew Strauss in 1996 and 2005 respectively.
Test debutant Sandakan produced a mirror image of those dismissals to send Burns packing on day four of the first Test in Kandy.
Bowling his first over of Australia’s second innings, Sandakan sent down a wide ball to the right-handed Burns that spun back viciously and beat the bottom edge of the Australian’s rapidly descending bat before rattling into the stumps.
It proved the 25-year-old – yes, that fresh-faced smile belongs to someone who is 25 – has more in his weaponry than a wicked wrong’un.
During the first innings Sandakan constantly befuddled the Australian batsman with his ball that turns the other way, and later revealed he had more variations up his sleeve.
“I have four,” Sandakan said when asked how many varieties he has, before one plucky journalist asked if he’d be willing to share those deliveries with the assembled press.
“I don’t think so,” he said with a grin.
Sandakan isn’t the only bowler to channel his inner Warne lately, with Pakistan leggie Yasir Shah prompting comparisons with the Australian legend after knocking over England’s Gary Ballance at Old Trafford.
It was the same ground where Warne produced his ‘Gatting ball’ but Shah’s delivery in fact had more in common with the ball Warne send down to bowl then-England captain Strauss at Edgbaston in 2005.
