Most spinners watch the batter’s feet before release. Santner watches all of him, the feet, the hands, the head, to read the mind through micro-movement and weight distribution.

“You need to watch every part of them as closely as possible. At times, especially when it’s flat or if I think the batter is going to do something, I watch him even harder,” he said during the 2023 World Cup. He breaks stride in his run-up to decipher “if they’re going to charge at me or try something.” His stutter-step is a penalty taker’s, forcing the goalkeeper to commit first so that he can alter his plan.

Reading the batter’s designs while running in is difficult enough; planning and executing the perfect response in a split-second takes an obscene degree of mastery. The spectacled assassin has mastered the elusive art like few others in the format. His deception is simple; it’s also flexible. He has just the basic left-arm spinner’s variations: the one that goes away and the other that cuts in with the arm. But within the orthodox ball, he has two varieties. The over-spun ball that drops and bounces, the side-spun sibling that spins away sharply. So he spins the ball sharply to flummox batters on subcontinent turners, but foxes them with bounce and drop in SENA nations. He undercuts the ball with a more round-arm release, and from wider off the crease, for the arm ball. A ball he calls the saucer ball for its flatter trajectory.

He doesn’t guard his secrets fiercely. He explains his variations in a video with Cricket Life Stories: “I get the palm forward for side-spin… For the over-spun ones I get my palms higher. Then I bowl the kind of under-spinner, the kind that really skids off the pitch. So I lay the palm back, lay the wrist off that way (shows an anti-clockwise rotation of the palm),” he says.

For the over-spun delivery, he lets the index finger roll over the ball, like opening the doorknob with left hand, the seam pointing almost 45 degrees to the slip cordon. For the side-spinner, he keeps the ball more perpendicular to the pitch. He knows batters, watching him as intensely as he watches them, could decipher his variations from the minute changes in his release and action.

But they can’t judge in absolute terms his flight, drop and pace, the subtleties he learned from watching Daniel Vettori. “The balls he bowled looked similar, but came out differently,” he observed. Like Vettori, he has mastered the visual deception of drop, facilitated by the revolutions he imparts on the ball. It’s his foremost advice to young spinners: “Learn how to give revvs and then build accuracy. Not the other way around.” His speed-spectrum is wizardly. The average ball clocks 85 kph, but some drop to 75 and some touch 95, with no discernible change in arm-speed.

His outwitting of Naman Dhir in the second T20I was an instance of all three elements blending ideally. He has been shifting between high pitch and low pitch like a seasoned musician. The deliveries to the left-handed Tilak Varma touched the mid-90s, but those to Dhir hovered in the mid-70s. He teased him with flighted balls outside the off-stumps, whereas those to Tilak were flatter and onto his body. He sensed Dhir’s urges to loft him over extra cover. He pulled the fielder into the ring and threw the bait. He saw his front foot triggered to stride out. He floated the ball over his eye-line. Dhir’s front foot leapt out and the hands followed, set to thump the ball over the ropes. Except that he couldn’t reach the pitch of the ball. He lost his balance, miscued the ball to the fielder at extra cover and fell over in his follow-through.

In the unorthodox spin-verse of T20s, he is an outlier. He wouldn’t make left-arm spin fashionable like Shane Warne did leg-spin. But he is showing that orthodox left-arm spin can retain all its grandeur in a world of fat bats and short boundaries, that the deception of a spinner in this format lies less in variations than in the know-how of when, where and how to use them. Let his still, placid eyes not deceive you. They do not foretell the layers of deception to come.

Strings in Santner’s bow

His variations are standard. He bowls two varieties of the orthodox ball: the over-spun delivery that bounces, and the side-spun one that turns more theatrically. Then there is the arm ball that skids on. But his deception is multilayered.

Drop dead gorgeous: He is a master of this effect. The over-spun balls carry topspin, which makes them drop short of where the batter expects. Attempting to play him from the crease, not least hitting him in the air, is fraught with risk.

Speed master: Few modern spinners operate effectively over such a vast speed range. One ball skids at 95 kph; another, with the same action, loops at 75 kph. Then there is everything in between. Batters can premeditate, at their own peril.

Taking flight: For drop to trick batters, he has to flight the ball. At 183cm, he gains a lot of natural flight. He uses different release points, yet manages sufficient flight with all of them. Whichever trajectory he bowls, his length seldom wavers, even if his line sometimes does.