A series of broken fingers meant he had been short of cricket, so a 20-year-old Mousley approached a coach at the Warwickshire Academy with connections to Sri Lanka and asked if he could get a game. A few weeks later he was off to Colombo.
Mousley has never been one to do things the usual way. A point he is now proving with his one-of-a-kind “offspin”.
No one in the world bowls like Mousley does. According to CricViz, he is the fastest spin bowler since ball tracking records began in 2006. And by miles.
“We’ll take it anyway,” he jokes.
His speed has always been part of his style. But compared to when he was younger and encouraged to slow down, now he is being encouraged to lean into it.
“I don’t know where he’s got it from,” England captain Jos Buttler said of Mousley, who was entrusted with the final over of West Indies’ innings on Sunday. “As a captain, it’s unique. Everyone will see him now and so they’ll come up with plans. But his character is one of his biggest attributes and to deliver a bit of unique skill and give us a point of difference is fantastic.”
“It started off because people say offspinners can’t bowl at right-handers. But I don’t believe in that, I made it clear at Warwickshire and then ended up getting a bit of confidence. It’s a different skill, it’s probably not traditional offspin but it’s one of those things which I’ve learnt”
Dan Mousley
Mousley will be a fascinating case study of whether this is the future appearing in front of our eyes, or a fad that’ll soon be understood by batters and launched into orbit.
With T20 scores always on the up, some commentators, including Sourav Ganguly, have called upon bowlers to step-up and up-skill. New challenges have to be presented to players and Mousley is presenting one.
If you wanted to be cruel, you could make the case that Mousley’s bowling is, by traditional aesthetics, bad. In the warm-ups, when other spinners are hammering the tea towel that’s been draped on a length, he is spraying it at pace in various different directions. There is no spin on the ball as it is released, instead he has flipped his fingers round and bowled what’s pretty much a standard seamer.
“Any player that is not trying to get better and diversify is a sitting duck,” he added.
Mousley is not a one-trick pony either, with eight first-class wickets at an average of 38.37, he is capable of bowling in a traditional manner with a traditional skillset. But if you’re bowling to Andre Russell and Nicholas Pooran, pretty offies aren’t going to get you very far.
In short, rather than attempting to always bowl wicket-taking deliveries, he is trying to bowl the ball that is hardest to hit for six.
“I’m just trying to use the conditions,” says Mousley, who has played the majority of his T20 cricket at Edgbaston, which often has one long side and one short. “I know I bowl a lot of yorkers, but I try and use the dimensions and try to use the wind as much as I can.”
Batters are honed on a lifetime of responding to certain cues. It is why left-handed bowlers feel faster than right-handed bowlers because batters don’t have the same level of muscle memory hard-wired into their body. And it’s this lack of familiarity which Mousley feeds off. Stick the ball in his hand and give him a ten yard run-up and he’s a 70mph seamer who’d go the distance. But off three paces and from round the wicket? No-one has seen that before. Batters are concert pianists that have been trained within an inch of their life; Mousley is asking them to play jazz.
“It started off because people say offspinners can’t bowl at right-handers,” Mousley says.
“But I don’t believe in that, I made it clear at Warwickshire I didn’t believe in that and then ended up getting a bit of confidence. It went from there. It’s a different skill, it’s probably not traditional offspin but it’s one of those things which I’ve just learnt to bring into my favour. It’s okay to be different as a bowler.”
And if there’s one thing Mousley’s bowling is, it’s exactly that.
Cameron Ponsonby is a freelance cricket writer in London. @cameronponsonby
