A sequence of damaged fingers meant he had been in need of cricket, so a 20-year-old Mousley approached a coach on the Warwickshire Academy with connections to Sri Lanka and requested if he might get a sport. A number of weeks later he was off to Colombo.
Mousley has by no means been one to do issues the standard approach. Some extent he’s now proving together with his one-of-a-kind “offspin”.
Nobody on this planet bowls like Mousley does. In line with CricViz, he’s the quickest spin bowler since ball monitoring information started in 2006. And by miles.
“We’ll take it anyway,” he jokes.
His pace has all the time been a part of his type. However in comparison with when he was youthful and inspired to decelerate, now he’s being inspired to lean into it.
“I do not know the place he is received it from,” England captain Jos Buttler mentioned of Mousley, who was entrusted with the ultimate over of West Indies’ innings on Sunday. “As a captain, it is distinctive. Everybody will see him now and they also’ll provide you with plans. However his character is one in all his greatest attributes and to ship a little bit of distinctive ability and provides us a degree of distinction is unbelievable.”
“It began off as a result of folks say offspinners cannot bowl at right-handers. However I do not imagine in that, I made it clear at Warwickshire after which ended up getting a little bit of confidence. It is a totally different ability, it is in all probability not conventional offspin however it’s a type of issues which I’ve learnt”
Dan Mousley
Mousley will likely be an interesting case examine of whether or not that is the longer term showing in entrance of our eyes, or a fad that’ll quickly be understood by batters and launched into orbit.
With T20 scores all the time on the up, some commentators, together with Sourav Ganguly, have referred to as upon bowlers to step-up and up-skill. New challenges need to be offered to gamers and Mousley is presenting one.
In case you needed to be merciless, you could possibly make the case that Mousley’s bowling is, by conventional aesthetics, dangerous. Within the warm-ups, when different spinners are hammering the tea towel that is been draped on a size, he’s spraying it at tempo in numerous totally different instructions. There isn’t any spin on the ball as it’s launched, as a substitute he has flipped his fingers spherical and bowled what’s just about an ordinary seamer.
“Any participant that isn’t attempting to get higher and diversify is a sitting duck,” he added.
Mousley will not be a one-trick pony both, with eight first-class wickets at a median of 38.37, he’s able to bowling in a conventional method with a conventional skillset. However in case you’re bowling to Andre Russell and Nicholas Pooran, fairly offies aren’t going to get you very far.
Briefly, fairly than making an attempt to all the time bowl wicket-taking deliveries, he’s attempting to bowl the ball that’s hardest to hit for six.
“I am simply attempting to make use of the circumstances,” says Mousley, who has performed nearly all of his T20 cricket at Edgbaston, which frequently has one lengthy aspect and one brief. “I do know I bowl plenty of yorkers, however I attempt to use the scale and attempt to use the wind as a lot as I can.”
Batters are honed on a lifetime of responding to sure cues. It’s why left-handed bowlers really feel sooner than right-handed bowlers as a result of batters haven’t got the identical degree of muscle reminiscence hard-wired into their physique. And it is this lack of familiarity which Mousley feeds off. Stick the ball in his hand and provides him a ten yard run-up and he is a 70mph seamer who’d go the gap. However off three paces and from around the wicket? No-one has seen that earlier than. Batters are live performance pianists which have been skilled inside an inch of their life; Mousley is asking them to play jazz.
“It began off as a result of folks say offspinners cannot bowl at right-handers,” Mousley says.
“However I do not imagine in that, I made it clear at Warwickshire I did not imagine in that after which ended up getting a little bit of confidence. It went from there. It is a totally different ability, it is in all probability not conventional offspin however it’s a type of issues which I’ve simply learnt to deliver into my favour. It is okay to be totally different as a bowler.”
And if there’s one factor Mousley’s bowling is, it is precisely that.
Cameron Ponsonby is a contract cricket author in London. @cameronponsonby
