How Santner slows it up to get the drop on batters

It won't go down as the ball of this World Cup. Or even the best ball bowled by a left-arm orthodox spinner at this World Cup. Or even the best ball bowled by Mitchell Santner at this World Cup - that honour, surely, will go to the pitch-leg, hit-off ripper he bowled to Mohammad Nabi in Chennai.

This ball wasn't that kind of ball, the kind that becomes instant social-media fodder. This was different, a ball less about its own magnificence than what it revealed about the bowler's craft in totality. This was the kind of ball that made you wish you had paid more attention to every preceding ball this bowler had sent down, and resolve to pay extra attention to every subsequent ball.

Santner delivered this ball from wide of the crease, his round-arm release accentuating the angle into the right-hand batter. The trajectory, looping up above Angelo Mathews' eyeline, drew him forward, towards what his muscle memory must have told him was a comfortable front-foot block.

Mathews' eyes, however, had deceived him. He had committed fully to a front-foot stride when he realised it was getting him nowhere. Having hung deliciously in the air for a split-second, the ball plummeted, landing perhaps half a foot short of where the batter may have expected it to. As Mathews reached for the ball, his left arm at full stretch, it turned and bounced towards the outside shoulder of his bat. Mathews yanked his bottom hand off the handle in a desperate attempt to cushion the ball's impact, but that did nothing to prevent it from popping gently into the hands of Daryl Mitchell at slip.

Santner had beaten Mathews in flight, comprehensively.

Spinners do this in many ways. Some do this by means of dip, the effect of vicious overspin on the ball, but while overspin was certainly an ingredient here, it may not have been Santner's primary mode of deceiving Mathews. In this case, it was perhaps more to do with the pace at which Santner had delivered this ball.

The ball clocked 78.7kph, and this was slow both in absolute terms, judged against the average speed of the average 21st-century fingerspinner, and relative to Santner's average speed, which lies somewhere in the mid-80s. And among the fingerspinners playing at this World Cup, hardly anyone varies their pace as much as Santner does, ranging all the way from the mid-70s to the mid-90s.

For the batter, there are few, if any, clues to be gleaned about the pace at which Santner will release the ball from his approach to the crease and load-up. His run-up contributes little by way of momentum, since his action is distinctly stop-start, with a pause before he gets into his delivery stride.

Speaking to ESPNcricinfo before this World Cup, Santner spoke about this pause, and how it helps him read batters' intentions.

"If you talk to some of the other bowlers, they try to probably look at some spot on the pitch. I try to watch the batter the whole time," Santner said. "The little delay [in my action] helps me if they're going to charge at me or try something… At times, especially when it's flat or if I think the batsman is going to do something, I watch him even harder."

Bowlers with smoother, more rhythmic actions than Santner may be able to put more of their body into the ball than he does, which may translate into more revolutions on the ball, leading to more drift and dip. The trade-off for Santner, though, is that he gets a window into the batter's intentions in the split-second before he delivers the ball. It's a massive advantage in white-ball cricket, because there's a lot more premeditation at play, and because Santner has worked so hard to be able to vary his pace to such a degree without compromising on his length, he makes full use of this advantage.

It's why he often seems a step ahead of batters, most commonly when they try to make room and find out that he hasn't just followed them but almost pre-empted them with his adjustment of line. It's why he gets through entire spells of seeming to simply bowl normally and escape punishment even on the flattest of pitches. It's how he ended up going for just 37 in his ten overs, without conceding a single four or six, on an Ahmedabad pitch where England made 282.

It's why he's part of an exclusive club at this World Cup: spinners with at least 10 wickets at a sub-25 average and an economy rate of below five. Ravindra Jadeja and Kuldeep Yadav are the other two members of this club, and all three will now most likely feature in a blockbuster semi-final at the Wankhede Stadium.