Mickey Arthur asks fans to stop over analyzing Maheesh Theekshana's variations ahead of T20 WC

Mystery spinners are quite intriguing and a rare commodity in the game of cricket. Over the past few years, we have seen names like Ajantha Mendis, Sunil Narine, Saeed Ajmal, and more recently, Varun Chakravarty, who have troubled the batters with their canny variations, and their unorthodox action. The likes of Mendis and Narine have gone onto bamboozle top teams and dominated cricket for close to two-three years for Sri Lanka and West Indies respectively.

While Mendis may have quit playing for Sri Lanka, the team is now blessed to have Maheesh Theekshana, who is in the same mold as the former Lankan spinner. Theekshana burst onto the scene in the recently concluded 50-overs series versus South Africa, when he was handed his ODI cap for the third game of a three-match series.

The mystery spinner didn’t disappoint his skipper and had a memorable debut. He picked up four wickets and left the South African batters gasping for breath. Theekshana with unusual action was hard to pick by. With already the R Premadasa pitch in Colombo being on the slower side, the Proteas batters failed to read the off spinner’s carrom ball and straight ones.

Impressed by Theekshana’s performance, one of the fans took to Twitter to share images of his variations, and in the images, one can see how the youngster has different wrist positions for the carrom ball. In the post, the user was in awe of the Lankan player and wrote, “Maheesh Theekshana has more variations than you can shake a leg at. Last night, we analyzed 2 of them, as spotted by @TheCricketArk- with some fascinating results! These are great split-screens, telling us what the batsman sees..#SLvSA”

Seeing this Tweet, Sri Lankan head coach Mickey Arthur took a cheeky dig at the fan and wrote, “can we hang on analyzing him too much before the WC please!”

Can we hang on analysing him to much before the WC please! 🤣 https://t.co/2iwMrNKKBg

— Mickey Arthur (@Mickeyarthurcr1) September 11, 2021

Maheesh Theekshana included in the Sri Lanka squad for the T20 World Cup

Owing to his mystery element, Theekshana was included by Sri Lanka (SLC) officials for the upcoming ICC T20 World Cup 2021. The Asian team has to play the qualifiers first scheduled to begin in Oman from October 17. With Theekshana having just played an ODI and a T20I game, teams might have trouble picking him due to his unorthodox bowling action.