Can Ashwin script a new chapter in his ODI career starting - where else - at Chepauk?

If you were to compile a highlights reel of R Ashwin's career, you'll have no shortage of memorable Test-match wickets to choose from - the pitch-leg, hit-off dismissals of Alastair Cook at Edgbaston, for instance, or the ripping, Muraliesque offbreak with which he bowled Kane Williamson in Kanpur, or these two beauties to Ollie Pope in Ahmedabad. He's enjoyed a parallel career as a T20 pathbreaker, so you'll also throw in his first-over arm ball to Chris Gayle from the 2011 IPL final and the carrom ball from hell to Hashim Amla from the 2014 T20 World Cup.

It's perhaps harder to recall, off the top of your head, the magic moments of Ashwin the ODI bowler. It has something to do with the nature of the format and the limited room it has lately had for fingerspin, and a lot to do with the fact that Ashwin has only played four ODIs in the last six years.

Just under two weeks ago, though, Ashwin bowled what may have been the ball of his ODI career, a reverse carrom ball that swung into Marnus Labuschagne and straightened off the deck to beat his closed bat face and hit off and middle. An inswinger holding its line, a delivery that's existed for as long as the cricket ball has had a stitched seam, delivered in a manner that no one had previously even thought to attempt. Not a bad ball to bowl if you've played next to no ODI cricket for six years and get a chance out of nowhere to stake your claim for a World Cup.

Four days after he'd bowled that ball - and made David Warner bat right-handed, without much success, in an effort to counter his threat - Ashwin was in India's World Cup squad.

On Friday evening, two days out from India's tournament-opener against Australia, Ashwin was bowling at the Chepauk nets. The scene already resembled a lurid fever dream thanks to the floodlights and India's orange training kit, and one delivery to Suryakumar Yadav heightened this feeling: he went back, looking to work it into the leg side, only for the ball to leave him and square him up.

From the outside there was no way to tell what ball Ashwin had bowled. It may have been a carrom ball, a reverse carrom ball that found a bit of grip, an arm ball, or a drifting offbreak that didn't turn.

Whatever this ball was, it had done the unexpected. Much like Ashwin over these last few weeks.

Six years ago, Ashwin was out of India's ODI squad, seemingly for good, because he and Ravindra Jadeja weren't giving India wickets in the middle overs. If he's back now, it isn't so much because he's turned into a different bowler but because India's needs have changed, and they've moved other pieces of their jigsaw to create room for his skillset.

It's a skillset that might not make too much of an impression on the kind of pitch that The Oval produced for the 2017 Champions Trophy, or the English pitches that India expected at the 2019 World Cup. The same skillset, though, is just what India needed ahead of a World Cup in home conditions, where their combination, at certain venues, could have room for a third spinner.

Chennai quite likely is one of those venues. Its outfield isn't massive, but it's bigger than those at most Indian grounds, and the pitch tends to provide a fair amount of grip. It's harder here than at most other grounds to hit spinners out of the attack. The most recent ODI here, in March, told quite a story: Australia batted first and were bowled out for 269, with India's three spinners combining to take 5 for 147 in 28 overs. India's chase began promisingly but fizzled out, with Australia's spinners bagging 6 for 86 in 20 overs.

The pitch for Sunday's clash between the same sides is likely to be similar. Chennai's square has both black- and red-soil pitches, and the pitch selected for the game is a black-soil one. While soil type isn't a foolproof indicator of a pitch's character, black-soil pitches in India tend to play slower and lower than red-soil pitches.

India will have quite a few difficult selections to make as they journey through the league phase of this World Cup, meeting nine different opponents at nine different venues. The most conditions-dependent choice they'll make is likely to be the one between Ashwin and Shardul Thakur: third spinner who bats a bit versus third seamer who bats a bit.

That choice could be exceedingly tricky on some occasions. It might be rather more straightforward at Chepauk. This is Ashwin's home ground, a ground where he once said, after running through Australia in a Test match, that "the air is talking to me, each man sitting in the stands is talking to me".

Ashwin's ODI journey has been long and circuitous and full of unexpected turns. It makes sense that it brings him here now, back where it all began.