From being a trailblazing mystery spinner who had the world in the tip of his fingers, Ajantha Mendis has in the ten years since gone on to play club cricket in Colombo as a specialist batsman, but his influence is still seen everywhere, writes Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist Jonathan Liew.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Ajantha Mendis a little bit. Not constantly, you understand. That would be both slightly weird and grossly disproportionate, given that it’s now more than three years since he last turned out in the blue of Sri Lanka, getting blazed to all parts by Brendon McCullum and Martin Guptill in an ODI against New Zealand.

It was curiously fitting that it should end like this: taken apart on a Christchurch green top by much bigger boys, a spectacular collapse to an international career that rose in much the same fashion when he took 6-13 against India in just his eighth ODI. Mendis is still only 34, an age when spinners are traditionally supposed to be at peak maturity. And yet, the line was drawn under the Mendis era some time ago.

And yet, the parable of Mendis serves as much as a warning as an inspiration. In a world where no mystery stays mysterious for very long, young spinners face a constant challenge to innovate and develop. Even Ravi Ashwin has been forced to add new variations to his routine: a wrist-spinning leg-break, a delivery he describes as the “reverse carrom”. This is the world Mendis helped to build, even if he’s no longer around to fill it.