The many variations of Eshan Malinga

There was subtlety to Eshan Malinga's plan for David Miller's dismissal in Hyderabad, which is now his favourite wicket of IPL 2026. The 25-year-old figured that reverse swing becomes a weapon in the second half of an innings at SRH's home venue, and even found a little bit of it in Nitish Rana's wicket at the start of the 11th over. When Miller arrived, having recently finished a chase for DC, Malinga repeated his idea. He went with the same length as the previous delivery, got a hint of reverse and knocked back the stumps.

Eshan Malinga is a man of few words, unless you talk to him about his bowling strengths. That's when his eyes light up and details come dashing out. "As a fast bowler, I think my biggest strength is the yoker, and reverse swing and the slow ball bouncer. I have a few variations and I'm backing my bowling with them. That's my strength... and the fast bouncer," Eshan tells Cricbuzz.

Eshan wasn't always an operator of myriad trades. He was every bit a cliche of an aspiring fast bowler - tall and impressively quick. He turned up at the Airtel Sri Lanka's Fastest - a program in Colombo that crowned the fastest bowlers in the country, and delivered at 141kmph as an 18-year-old to win it.

But to even get there and bowl with the leather ball needed a fairly long six-hour journey to Colombo from his hometown of Ratnapura, where incidentally there were no turf wickets back then. So Eshan's early trysts with cricket involved tennis ball tournaments, where he employed two of the many variations he eventually staked a claim to - the quick bouncer, which came naturally to him, and the slower-ball bouncer that worked as a neat trick to unfurl every now and then.

Eshan's transition to leather ball bowling, and adding to his repertoire of trickery, came when he trained under Chamila Gamage in Colombo. Gamage, a renowned fast bowling coach who has shaped the journeys of fellow Sri Lankan quicks like Matheesha Pathirana and Dilshan Madushanka, had been impressed by his first viewing of Eshan, long before he coached him.

Back home in Ratnapura, a young Eshan would tie clothes between two trees at his home and keep bowling at it. Gamage found his action repeatable and pace impressive even then, and gladly opened the doors of his training academy a few years later for him to transition towards leather ball cricket. Eshan was laid low by injuries for a couple of years, but when he got back to action, he and Gamage began to reshape his bowling. "When he started, the number one ball for him was the bouncer. Then we developed his yorker," Gamage tells Cricbuzz.

The slinginess of his bowling action, like that of his more famous namesake, aided in drilling the yorker into his game. For everything else, the duo found unique training techniques. Gamage introduced Eshan to step-bowling. In the nets under Gamage's supervision, Eshan would bowl 20-30 deliveries from just a single step run-up. Then he would graduate to two steps, and then three and four before finally moving on to the full run-up. "Sometimes he would bowl only three or four steps all day. This helps in understanding how he's feeling physically, how he's releasing the ball and visualising his ideas," Gamage explains. For swing, they'd condition his wrists by training with a heavy ball for hours .

During this IPL season too, Eshan has found new ways of keeping his game sharp. From step bowling, he moved to spot bowling. "I bowl two-three overs to the batters in the nets and after that for the next two-three overs, only spot bowling. I put some boots around the pitch and bowl yorkers and practice my slower ones," Eshan explains.

"We have to go with some variations because batters are always looking to hit. I am just trying to confuse them," he says with a chuckle. "I bowl fast and suddenly I bowl a slower one to confuse them. Because they're looking for pace on deliveries and I am trying to change things."

For everything that has gone right for Eshan in the last two years, there was 2024 that came as a big stepping stone. Eshan's journey has been unconventional, not just in that he has had to make a very tough switch from tennis-ball to leather-ball game, but also that he didn't play a lot of age-group cricket for Sri Lanka. Yet, he went to Oman to represent Sri Lanka A at the Emerging Asia Cup in 2024, and returned a different bowler.

The then 23-year-old, who'd grown up idolising Brett Lee and Dale Steyn for being the gun pacers they were, kept evolving and developed a slower one (besides the bouncer) during the course of that tournament. He picked six wickets in five fixtures there in October, and a month later landed an IPL gig with SRH worth INR 1.2 crore.

He was yet to make his senior national team debut, but his reputation and knack for effective death bowling and yorkers had already made its way into scouting reports of IPL teams. RR, a team known to recognise talent early, were in for him too but were outmuscled by SRH.

Earlier in the same year, Eshan was in India for a three-month camp at the MRF Pace Foundation where he picked Glenn McGrath's brains about the Aussie legend's methods from back in the day, the art of swing bowling and how he could level up. There too, he turned his focus to spot bowling.

In 2025, Eshan followed a seven-game IPL stint (13 wickets) with his T20I debut for Sri Lanka later in the year, and carried some crucial experiences forward.

"Before I played IPL, I didn't play many T20 matches. Just the one LPL and eight domestic T20 games. I didn't have a lot of experience. Playing in the IPL gave me that strong mindset," he says. "Everyone [in the IPL] is coming out to hit and we as bowlers too want to go hard against them. But sometimes we have go into a defensive mindset. Learning those things helped me when I went to the national side. It helped me with how to handle a situation and my decision-making."

The shift in his game has shone through further this year. He's been an indispensable part of a relatively inexperienced pace attack for SRH, and has nearly delivered every game after a rough start.

Today in Ratnapura, there's a turf wicket about an hour's drive away from Eshan's home. But he doesn't need it, for his cricket is already taking him places. Armed with all of his variations and the education on how best to use them, Eshan arrived in India for IPL 2026 with two clear targets in mind: to pick 20 wickets, and for one of them to be Virat Kohli's. He's just eight away from achieving that first aim, while a meeting with RCB towards the end of the league stage, opens the floor for him to attempt the second.