Ashwin is a tall offspinner who took the soduku ball, a finger-flicked tennis-ball leg break, from Chennai's streets and applied it to a bigger, harder cricket ball in international cricket. Ajantha Mendis' carrom ball served as his motivation. Mendis watched him in a game in Chennai and returned home confident it could be done with a cricket ball too, even before he had played for Sri Lanka and bamboozled India's heavyweight Test line-up in one series. Back then, in his maiden season of first-class cricket, Ashwin worked tirelessly on that variation with his long fingers. Ashwin unleashed Mendis shortly after it had been a fleeting fad.