3 min readMar 24, 2026 10:01 AM IST
From the enormous hands of a table tennis-loving warbird of World War II from Victoria, through the pliant palms of a skinny Sri Lankan with curious eyes several generations later, the carrom ball has transformed from an exotic mystery weapon to a mainstream trick en masse. Jack Iverson (or grip Jack as he was called), who suffered depression and took his life at 58, died without knowing the ball he trialled in far-flung corners of his postings would capture the cricket world’s imagination several eras later. Ajantha Mendis, its modern-day re-inventor and with an Army background himself, never knew that his finger-flicker would outlive his unfulfilled career, which is as much a warning as an inspiration. Neither, though, coined the term, which is attributed to a Sri Lankan lawyer based in Toronto.
The carrom ball, apart from its enduring knack to torment batsmen much after its mystery has faded, has breathed a new twist to off-spin bowling in T20s, evolving and adapting, remaking and unmaking, at a brutally relentless rate. Almost every noteworthy off-spinner this century has tried aligning the fingers and flicking it like a carrom striker. The great experimentalist R Ashwin (who picked it from the tennis-ball circuit) developed not only the carrom, but the reverse carrom too. The repertoire of white-ball off-spinners is hollow without this. Varun Chakaravarthy, Sunil Narine, Mujeeb-ur-Rahman and Maheesh Theekshana are all armed with a carrom ball, with a slight, personal spin. For instance, Narine keeps his middle finger straighter than most. Varun gets higher revs because he has long digits. Theekshana sometimes bowls it with an upright seam.
To be an off-spinner in the T20 milieu means someone who could bowl a carrom ball at will. While off-spinners are the most common carrom-ball traders, left-arm finger spinners like Rangana Herath (in 1999, he bowled Steve Waugh with a “new ball”) and more recently Sai Kishore have woven the variation into their craft.
The method has not undergone rapid transformations since Iverson delivered his. The ball is held along the seam, usually tilted towards the gully, between the thumb and index finger, before it is flicked with the middle finger. Tracing a flattish and lower trajectory, into the right-handed batsman with the angle and quicker than the stock ball, it holds the line or just shapes away. Mendis, before his shoulders rebelled, used to purchase more turn than his modern-day practitioners. In a sense, it was a response to the suspicion as well as the difficulty of mastering the doosra, the original mystery ball.
The potency of the much-dissected delivery depends on how smartly a bowler disguises it (like the same arm-speed as the standard off-break), in his use of pace, angle, length and release points. The reason it succeeds, despite deciphering, is for the same reasons the more conventional variations still succeed. Like a pacer’s out-swinger or nip-backer. But some never became instant hits; some were ahead of the times. Like the carrom ball.
