He's only playing his second Test match, but Manav Suthar is already settling into patterns we could ostensibly call habits.
On debut against Afghanistan in June, Suthar introduced himself with the left-arm spinner's dream ball, and bowled it again and again. Three times in a row, he drew Abdul Malik onto the front foot with his flight, and beat his outside edge comprehensively with dip and turn. Suthar took his first Test wicket with his fourth ball, and it came off an ugly, miscued swipe that was a culmination of all the scars inflicted over those first three balls.
On Monday, Suthar bowled his first ball in an away Test match, and once again it was the ball you might picture if you closed your eyes and thought of the words left-arm orthodox. But only if you've watched a certain amount of cricket on the grainy, crackling television screens of the 20th century.
It began with the run-up: a proper jog rather than the amble favoured by most 21st-century spinners, helping Suthar gather momentum into a proper pre-delivery jump. This run-up, moreover, was angled, tracing a diagonal between the umpire and the stumps to enable Suthar to get properly side-on. No one does this anymore. Everyone runs up in a straight line.
And then came the high-arm release, with Suthar's fingers ripping upwards behind the ball, so it came out of his hand laden with overspin, with the seam angled towards first slip.
The ball hung above Dinesh Chandimal's eyeline, drawing him forward, and dipped vertiginously. It landed far, far shorter than Chandimal must have anticipated, and he was in no position to defend safely. The ball turned and spat at Chandimal's gloves, and there was nothing he could do about it but walk off the field, c Pant b Suthar 4.
Having come on in the eighth over of Sri Lanka's innings, Suthar got the ball to dip and bounce constantly through his first spell, and frequently turn square as well. One ball spun across the face of Lahiru Udara's bat after pitching marginally outside leg stump. One dipped on the left-handed Kamindu Mendis and made him reach out and nearly pop a catch to mid-on. At one point during Suthar's spell, a TV graphic showed he was generating an average of six degrees of turn. It's hard to think of a genuine fingerspinner - Muthiah Muralidaran's unorthodox methods made him much more of a wristspinner - who has turned the ball more in recent times.
The one downside of Suthar's overspin during his first spell was that he tended to go short rather than full when he erred, and Udara pulled and slapped him for a pair of fours. This, however, played an indirect part in his eventual dismissal. Udara snatched too eagerly at a cut when the ball may not have been short enough, and sharp turn ensured he played the shot off-balance, falling away from the line and slicing a catch to backward point.
By the end of his first spell, Suthar had figures of 6-1-13-2. This was the impact Suthar's fans must have foreseen - or at least hoped for - when they pictured him bowling on this tour.
Sri Lanka is a land with plenty of help for spinners, but the pitches here are different to those back in India. Broadly speaking, the most profitable method for spin bowlers in India in the DRS era has been to target the stumps constantly while giving batters little time to react to natural variation. In Sri Lanka, pitches tend to offer a little more bounce, and demand slightly different methods: a little slower through the air, with more overspin than sidespin, and more reliance on close-in catchers than on bowled and lbw.
Where 46% of R Ashwin's home-Test wickets were either bowled or lbw, those modes of dismissal made up only 34% of his wickets in Sri Lanka - and he had an exceptional record in the island, taking 38 wickets at 21.57.
Suthar's style of fingerspin almost seems tailor-made for Sri Lankan conditions, and he was demonstrating it now. And while doing so, he was showing that there's still a place for old-fashioned left-arm orthodox in 21st-century Test cricket.
But Suthar is only old-fashioned up to a point. The wicket of Chandimal may have come straight out of this Bishan Bedi video, but Suthar's delivery clocked 88.3kph - 10-15kph quicker, perhaps, than Bedi's pre-speedgun speeds.
Even so, it's remarkable that Suthar exists as an Indian cricketer in the DRS era. Where most left-arm spinners who have played Tests for India in recent times have tended to be most dangerous while targeting the right-hand batter's pads with natural variation, Suthar's primary mode of attack is to test the outside edge. On Monday, his typical close-in set-up to the right-hander consisted of a slip, a gully and either silly point or short extra-cover. Seldom was anyone stationed at short leg.
Even Suthar's crease position at delivery is designed to maximise the threat of his turn away from the right-hander. Since 2007, when ball-tracking began to record this sort of data, Suthar's average release point is the closest to the stumps of all left-arm spinners bowling from around the wicket. Most left-arm spinners of this era tend to default to wide release points - often accentuated by a low arm - that exaggerate their inward angle and magnify the threat of the ball skidding on.
As Monday wore on, the beauty of Suthar's bowling remained undimmed, and his control improved, with the long-hops becoming rarer and rarer. But along the way, as the ball grew older and less responsive to the pitch, you could begin to sense some of his limitations. His stock ball continued to turn sharply, but while he bowled the occasional change-up with a square seam, he did not seem to extract too much natural variation. This seemed to reduce his threat particularly against left-hand batters; they ended up with a control percentage of 84.33 against Suthar as against the right-handers' 75.00.
Those numbers, of course, were also a consequence of left-handers tending to be more comfortable against left-arm spin than right-handers as a rule, and of Sonal Dinusha and Niroshan Dickwella, who put on an all left-handed partnership of 146 for the sixth wicket, being Sri Lanka's best batters on the day. But it was interesting that both right-hand batters (72.34) and left-hand batters (83.95) ended up with slightly worse control percentages against Ravindra Jadeja on the day than against Suthar.
On a day when he went past 350 Test wickets and struck three times to Suthar's four, Jadeja's performance neatly encapsulated his career. His bowling looked less spectacular and less of a purist's delight than that of his fingerspin partner, but he posed just as much of a threat.
Jadeja's dismissal of Dhananjaya de Silva, Sri Lanka's captain, summed this up. Over 13 balls, Jadeja made de Silva worry about both his edges. The 13th ball produced an inside edge into de Silva's pad. Then the 14th ripped square after angling into the stumps, and de Silva could do nothing but edge it to slip.
This is Jadeja's method. He's at the stumps ball after ball, and his length is seldom anything other than immaculate. He uses the crease better than any other left-arm spinner playing today, so one ball may look very much like another without being anything of the kind. And eventually, a batter will make a mistake and pay for it.
Jadeja's limitations become apparent on surfaces where his stock ball won't grip quite as much, and where he becomes less of a two-edge threat. Suthar is more gifted in terms of raw material: his dip, bounce and ability to turn his stock ball prodigiously make him a potential menace even on flat pitches, and make him the most exciting fingerspin prospect India have had since R Ashwin and Jadeja first broke through.
And Suthar is only 24, so it's a scary thought that he's already so good while having clear room for improvement. He has all the time in the world to add more facets to his bowling, particularly the use of the crease to magnify the threat of his stock ball. Happily for him and India, he has a master of that subtle art to watch and learn from.