Batters have signature shots. That’s a given. Certain shapes or sequences of shapes that you associate with that player for ever. The Ricky Ponting pull, the Brian Lara follow-through over the shoulder, fill your own list. It is much rarer for bowlers to have signature dismissals. There are so many ways to get players out, so many variations. A Nathan Lyon off-break may have a shape you can trace in your sleep, but what happens after reaching the bat has its unique character.

Pat Cummins has the Pat Cummins Ball. The Pat Cummins Dismissal. The one that KL Rahul received on the second day of the fourth Australia-India Test in Melbourne. Somehow, even on a pitch that is not dangerous or during an innings that is flowing the other team’s way, there are times when Cummins can make that delivery appear. It doesn’t bring every wicket that he takes, of course – it is still precious. But it has happened often enough that you know it on sight: part of a rare collection rather than a gem on its own.

The Cummins Ball has a few parts. It starts as any other, with his gently bow-legged jaunt to the top of his mark, channelling a cowboy who is a bit tender after too much time in the saddle. His shoulders roll, his walk projects both weariness and the willingness to keep working. The turn and the approaching run looks like it could continue all day. He has that straight, direct line, knees not especially high, elbows more pointed. The economical gather, arm by his ear.

The line is the thing, always to a right-hander. It’s about the subtleties. Starting with just enough width to have it heading in at the stumps, but not by much. Enough seam movement to take it back the other way, but only by a little. The first movement draws the player forward, into the line. There is every expectation of ball about to meet a defensive thunk.

But within that subtlety, there is something slippery about the delivery. About that line. It slides past the bat, barely, where seemingly there is no room to do so. It passes the outside edge, not the inside. And once it is free in that magic space behind the batter, unimpedible now in a field of possibility all its own, it sails beaming into the very top corner of the target, the crest of the off stump, using a perfect economy of contact to wreck the place entirely.

Joe Root is the most celebrated recipient, partly because people forget that he got done twice in the 2019 Ashes, conflating their Old Trafford memory with the Oval. But the Cummins Ball makes a speciality of taking out captains. Rohit Sharma got one only weeks ago, when he joined this series in Adelaide, and also had one in Nagpur last year. Kraigg Brathwaite got two in consecutive seasons in Australia, first in Perth, then Adelaide.

If it isn’t a formal leader, it’s a key player. Babar Azam got one in his Boxing Day Test, a year ago to the day before Rahul’s. Kusal Mendis got one in Canberra, Harry Brook at Lord’s last year. Alongside Root in 2019, Jos Buttler and Jason Roy each had their chastening moment. Far more rarely has a Cummins Ball appeared for a player who didn’t require such quality: we might suggest Maheesh Theekshana in Galle a couple of years back, or Umesh Yadav in the World Test Championship final.

So it was fitting that the latest appearance was to Rahul, India’s form player of the series, the one who has coped with Australia’s fast bowlers best. The tracking analysts showed that his Cummins Ball had close to three times as much seam movement as the one Root wore at Old Trafford, and was travelling faster. It was as good as it needed to be.

Given Cummins had already engineered a century partnership that morning, with 49 to Steve Smith’s 140 as Australia amassed 474 all out, the Rahul dismissal felt like the moment on which the day’s resistance or otherwise would turn. Virat Kohli and Yashasvi Jaiswal held on for a while, but collectively engineered the latter’s run out and the former nicked yet another needless push. India are five down and 310 behind, when they needed their form player to bat long.

Cummins has bowled plenty of other players: yorkers, chop-ons, missed slogs. He has a series of perfect in-duckers: Dawid Malan on one Adelaide evening, Faf du Plessis on the last day in Durban, Glenn Phillips or Ross Taylor in Sydney. But none is the Cummins Ball, where every ball that is the Cummins Ball, is. The look of it is all his own, the shapes are echoes, the batters in the way are shadows. Stand-in actors blocking on stage. Except that blocking never works. Plenty of bowlers might strive an entire Test career to bowl one perfect ball like that. Cummins produces them on the regular. Every one of them is the best wicket of his career. They are all the same.