Kuldeep wasn’t playing that game but he was chalking out the entrapment script and thus factoring in the variables like breeze. “It’s the way I always watch games when I’m not playing. Physically I might not be there, but mentally I am there, bowling uninterrupted for the entire day, fully switched on and aware,” he says. It’s been more than two months since that Test but those memories are fresh in the mind of the chinaman bowler, who is now preparing for the ODI series against Australia.

“For a spinner, the mind is the most important thing, it should never be idle, but always fresh, always thinking. So whoever is actually bowling in the middle, be it Jasprit or Ashwin bhai, I just imagine myself to be bowling at the batsmen, the things I would do, how I would look to get him out and how he would try to play me. And then I try to figure out the plans of Jasprit and Ashwin, who are very different bowlers.”

So every time, he came to bat, in Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, he would imagine setting him up with that delivery. And when the opportunity knocked in Sydney, the dream played out as a reality. All it required was seven deliveries the seventh, a classical chinaman delivery, one that hung for an eternity in the air, then dipped alarmingly and barged through the enormous space between his bat and pad. Then that’s the visual trickery of flight and dip.

Happy as Kuldeep was, he also felt a touch deficient, because Paine fell for the bait all too easily, just when the kick of out-thinking a batsman was kicking in. “The more you work on dismissing a batsman, the happier you get. Of course, you don’t want to dismiss him after he plunders hundred runs off your bowling, but the biggest thrill of spin bowling is about out-thinking a quality batsman. Yeh dimag wala khel hai!” he chuckles.

Not just the ball, but the whole build-up was rehearsed and nuanced to perfection several times. “I noticed that he liked to play Ash bhai on the back-foot, the good length balls. Slightly fuller ones, he would compulsively go for the drives, leaving a lot of space between the bat and the body. So when I slip in a full-length delivery after a few good-length ones, he would lunge for the drive. If I can beat him in the air, I can get him bowled.”

By his own admission, he doesn’t rely too much in video footages. The game that he isn’t playing is the game that he’s actually playing, “So that if I’m coming up against a new batsman, I know I have bowled at him several times in the mind and I know exactly what I need to get him out.”

The first thing Brad Hogg noticed about Kuldeep was his beaming smile. How can he smile so radiantly, he once asked him. Kuldeep says Rohit Sharma, one of his closest friends in the team, always queries about the secret of his smile. He replied: “I tell him I’m always happy, I don’t harbour any negative thoughts and I like to spread positive energy. I have long figured out that being glum doesn’t help anybody, neither you or your teammate.”

It’s also a facade, he says, that hides his fears and doubts. “I’m somebody who likes to feel pressure, so I put myself under pressure before matches. Before every match, I imagine that I’m making debut, getting hammered by the batsman or not getting any overs to bowl. Pressure always perks me up, you are always focused and aware, the mind hardly drifts. You can’t sit back on the five-for you’d picked in the last match,” he says. But at the same time, he can’t show pressure. So the smile.

The only time he couldn’t muster the smile to hide his inner turmoil was soon after the India-England Lord’s Test last summer. He was in the playing XI of a Test after nearly a year and there was pressure on him to do well. The conditions weren’t conducive for spin bowling. Rain and a chilling breeze adding to the woes of the wrist spinner.