It’s mid-afternoon in Colombo and Sri Lanka are sitting pretty at the SSC – having bowled the Englishmen out for 336, the hosts have cruised to 170/1 with just 4 overs to go for Tea.
Adil Rashid and Ben Stokes have been bowling in tandem for a bit but the elegant Dhananjaya De Silva and Dimuth Karunaratne have looked at ease since the dismissal of Danushka Gunathilake earlier in the day. But then, De Silva comes forward and flicks the ball onto the leg side. Coming off the face of the bat, the ball settles in the safe hands of Keaton Jennings at short-leg, to give the lanky close-in fielder his 2nd catch of the innings. A lapse of concentration, a ball that turned a little more than expected, call it what you will, but England had finally managed to end the Karunaratne-De Silva partnership, comfortably the best of the series, at what turned out to be a crucial juncture.
England take control as Sri Lanka implode
Sri Lanka lost their last 9 wickets for 67 runs on day 2 of the 3rd and final Test against England, to give the…
If you weren’t near a tv at this point, you probably were following the commentary on ESPNCricinfo, where a more than pertinent question came up – “Can Sri Lanka capitalise on this start?”
Unfortunately, in hindsight, the answer is a resounding NO.
It’s no secret that when teams like England, Australia and South Africa tour Sri Lanka, they are met with rank turners, the kind of surface that produces spin from ball one – so much so that Sri Lanka do not even bother playing more than one fast bowler and that guy usually doesn’t bowl much more than 10 overs in an innings.
So naturally, you’d think that the Sri Lankan batsmen play spin well right? Apparently not! Of the last 9 Test innings Sri Lanka have batted at home (including this innings), they’ve crossed the 300-run mark just twice. England on the other hand, have done the same 4 out of the 5 times they’ve come out to bat in this series alone! Of the 50 Sri Lankan wickets that have fallen during this series, 41 have gone to the English spinners – a number that reflects the quality of the opposition bowlers but also the aimlessness of the Lankan batsmen.
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To anyone watching the match at the SSC, it was obvious that the pitch wasn’t as difficult to bat on as the ones we saw in both Galle and Pallekelle. Which was why England would have been disappointed with the way their innings ended this morning and why we didn’t see as many sweeps and reverse sweeps from both sides. Dhananjaya De Silva seemed to agree at the press briefing at the end of the day’s play.
“Although there’s turn on this pitch, it wasn’t spinning so much that it was difficult to bat on. We’ve played on more difficult tracks before. It’s a good pitch for batting…… Our batting was very weak. But even more than that they bowled really well with a plan. They dried up the boundaries and bowled aggressively. If we had played to a better plan, we wouldn’t have crashed like this.”
So why then have the visitors been able to do so significantly better than the Sri Lankans? Looking at the dismissals after Tea, it’s apparent that Sri Lanka really didn’t seem to have much of a plan. Karunaratne and De Silva worked the singles and found the boundaries almost at will, their partnership coming at nearly 4 runs an over but after the pair were dismissed, the runs dried up.
Once Ben Stokes started peppering the batsmen with short stuff and Adil Rashid found his line, Sri Lanka were like deer in headlights. They got bogged down, they panicked and ultimately looked quite amateurish, losing their last 9 wickets for 67 runs after looking like they could take a substantial lead midway through the day.
De Silva too was understandably critical of the batsmen, “When we were 173 for 1 and then I got out, I don’t think the others were able to take the game forward as much as they could have. When they tried to attack us, we went to our attacking shots. I don’t think that was a good option at the time.”
Unfortunately for Sri Lanka, the time to rectify their mistakes in time to do themselves some justice in this series is gone, in fact a series sweep is imminent, but if the team is to stop this rut, they will need to understand that, as De Silva put it, “When you play Tests, you have to spend time and try and tire out the opposition, then the runs start to come. We have to think about all of that. The batsmen have to come up with those solutions themselves. No matter what someone else tells us, it’s the batsmen’s own mistake. They have to figure it out.”
