Nathan Lyon bowls mystery ball against Pakistan

Nathan Lyon

Australian off-spinner Nathan Lyon unveiled the much talked about mystery ball that he has been working on for sometime now. A couple of months ago, the 26-year-old had revealed that he was preparing a new delivery and had been seeking help with it from Sri Lankan legend Muttiah Muralitharan, who was working as Australia’s spin bowling consultant, ahead of their tour to the United Arab Emirates to play Pakistan.

Lyon finally bowled the mystery deliver during Pakistan’s second innings in the first Test at Dubai. Pakistan were moving on comfortably, building up a big lead, when Australia’s top ranked spinner decided to bowl a delivery that seemed to turn the other way.

Sarfraz Ahmed who was batting on 12* safely negotiated the ball and picked up a single.

Speaking about the delivery back in August, Lyon had said: "I'm trying to bowl a back-spinner at the moment, which is simply my grip is similar (to my off-spinner), but I push the ball back into my hand (and) my thumb comes on the ball. Instead of going over the top of the ball (with my wrist action), I'm coming down the back of the ball, which really releases the ball. So it's spinning backwards and hopefully hitting the pitch and going the other way."

On closer inspection, we can see that Lyon delivers the ball from the back of his hand, unlike the conventional off-spin delivery. Unlike the doosra, which requires bending of the arm to a certain degree, the right-arm bowler’s arm seems to be quite straight in this instance.

In the end, mystery ball or not, Pakistan comfortably beat Australia by 221 runs to go 1-0 up in the 2-match series. Lyon finished the match with underwhelming figures of 2/148 and 0/72. The two sides now move to Abu Dhabi for the 2nd Test.

Watch the video here.