No 4: Lasith Malinga

Play 02:52

Tom Moody on what made Lasith Malinga a T20 great

If you were a batter, you were feeling the menace of Lasith Malinga before he'd even bowled a ball. All your life you'd been used to watching the ball come out of the area roughly two feet above the bowler's head. In meetings, coaches and team-mates, and perhaps your own batting conscience, advised you to get used to the ball appearing near about where the umpire's collarbone was, before trying any fancy shots.

The thing with Malinga is that he knew that you'd been wondering how you'd play him as well. When up against batters who had never faced him before, Malinga would frequently bowl slower balls - a primary wicket-taking weapon against batters playing defensively. Many simple catches have popped up to infielders off newbie bats.

At his best, he was in your head right through an innings. He had only a handful of weapons, but often these were all razor-sharp. In the early going, you had to watch out for swing away from the right-hander. Those balls went late, and sometimes prodigiously - it was not unusual for round-arm Malinga to outswing even England bowlers in English conditions. If you were watching for the outswing, he would notice. He'd try to race one into your pads for the lbw.

To shake up the middle overs he had the bouncer. These he had perfected in his sporadic stints in the Test team, but their threat was untamed by the transfer to white-ball cricket. Malinga, until very late in his career, breached 140kph regularly. Because of his release point, batters tended to pick up his length later than they would with other bowlers. On top of which, many had never dealt with bouncers with that trajectory before.

At the death, his gifts were immense. If you liked to play the scoop, he had some of the greatest cutters going. If your strengths were to hit down the ground or over midwicket, he'd stack the off-side field and bowl yorkers that you had to reeeach for.

Even if you were a 360-degree hitter, the man still had moves. There was the slower bouncer, arguably the most effective yorker in the history of T20 cricket, and on dry, worn squares, that hint of reverse swing - another gleaning from the longest format.

Malinga was ridiculously penetrative at the death, of course. In that phase in IPL matches, for instance, he took 90 wickets (behind only Dwayne Bravo, who had 102), but his strike rate of 7.39 for those wickets is so ridiculous, not a single bowler with more than 20 death-overs wickets has struck as frequently.

Cometh the death, cometh the man: Malinga exults after his 2019 IPL final coup © Getty Images

But he didn't need to take wickets to dominate you at the death. Ask Yuvraj Singh, and MS Dhoni, whom Malinga muzzled in the 2014 T20 World Cup final. He took no wickets for 27 in that match, but may very well have been the MVP.

Malinga's appearances in leagues outside of the IPL were sporadic. He only played 13 Big Bash League matches across three seasons, for example, though he took 18 wickets and had the exemplary economy rate of 5.4. He never showed in the PSL, and played only two CPL games. In fact, 70% of his domestic T20 wickets were for Mumbai Indians. Largely this was down to a hectic international schedule for Sri Lanka, but also to his having to manage long-term knee and ankle injuries.

He took wickets in clumps (hello hat-tricks, and four-wickets-in-four-balls), broke up opening partnerships, struck hammer blows through the middle, and took lower-order wickets on an industrial scale. But if the physical qualities of his unprecedented style of bowling (in internationals, at least) were not enough, he still had his best play. You'd survive all of that and think you could breathe, but then the man would outthink you.

Career high: Malinga had two runs to defend off the last ball in the 2019 IPL final, and he slipped in a killer slower one to see his team clinch the trophy. But it's hard to look past that 2014 World Cup final, in which was the chief architect of the bowling strategy.

Stats in factfile sidebars are for all T20 matches, minus internationals, and current as up to the start of the 2025 IPL. League wins cover tournaments of four teams and above, and include seasons where the player appeared in at least one match for the winning team

Andrew Fidel Fernando is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo. @afidelf

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.