After 15 years replete with yorkers, from toe-smushers to clever, slower ones, Lasith Malinga left a lasting impression on ODI cricket, and bows out as a modern-day genius of the white-ball game.

Right from his formative playing days, Malinga was deemed an outlier, courtesy his quirky bowling action. His biggest challenge, therefore, was staying true to his identity. The ‘Rathgama Express’ faced several obstacles, but shape-shifted his way out of each of them with an array of variations.

Breaking down his ODI career into three broad phases, we see how much Malinga adapted, but how little he changed.

2004 to 2006: Finding his feet

In his seven games at the World Cup, the 35-year-old Malinga’s dot-ball percentage was 51.7 – only 12.46% of his deliveries went to the fence.

Between 2007 and 2012, Malinga’s yorkers had a dot-ball percentage of 60.4, and a boundary percentage of 4.87%. After 2015, the reduced speeds did little to affect his yorker – the dot-ball percentage was better at 63.57%, while the boundary percentage dropped to an astonishing 2.58%.

Malinga’s trust in his own abilities, and the effectiveness of his methods, stayed independent of his ageing body and diminishing speed. His 259 wickets in 173 games is the most by any ODI bowler in the last 10 years. This, despite him missing out on 70 of Sri Lanka’s last 122 ODIs over the last five years.

Malinga can now proudly look back at his legacy: constantly adapting, never quite changing.

CricViz numbers were incorporated in this analysis.