Sri Lanka

Making sense of Test victories and defeats

The Test world is a baffling place right now. There’s more uncertainty than when the cat finds himself equidistant from some food and an open door.

Australia are worse at home than they used to be, but India are worse away than they have been in recent times, so what does an Australian win mean?

India’s batsmen collapsed. Are they old? Are Australia’s young bowlers really good? Or did the pitch deteriorate? After all, Australia collapsed too. Then again, they often do at the minute, most notably against South Africa – although that’s hardly surprising because the Saffers have such a strong pace attack.

Or do they? Pitches there have been greener than a seasick parrot in recent times, but the bowlers haven’t outdone their opposite numbers. South Africa drew 1-1 with Australia and are currently 1-1 with Sri Lanka as well. Maybe it’s the batting that’s letting them down. Maybe it isn’t.

Sri Lanka themselves were comfortably beaten by Pakistan. Most people concluded that Sri Lanka were struggling, but maybe Pakistan are amazing.

The good news is that Sri Lanka play another Test in South Africa, while India will play three more Tests in Australia, which should help clarify some of this.

That bloody two-Test series between South Africa and Australia is where all this uncertainty came from. It raised questions and answered none. In cat terms, it added a comfy bed to the food-and-open-door situation, leaving us in a pain-faced, miaowing, triangular limbo.

The deflation of Sri Lanka

A lot of the life seems to have gone out of Sri Lanka since Murali’s retirement. On the face of it, the team’s much the same, but there’s a wrinkling and lack of solidity about them. They’re like yesterday’s balloon.

They haven’t shown much heart according to Russell Arnold. Maybe that’s because they haven’t been paid. A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Anything else saps the will a bit, no matter what other motivations you might have.

So where worse to play than South Africa, where dismissals are pleasingly frequent these days? All out for 180 isn’t even particularly shameful by current trends over there. It’s not good, but we’ve seen worse and South Africa aren’t threatening a giant lead.

When we say ‘giant lead’ we mean how many runs more than Sri Lanka they’ll score. We don’t mean an oversized leash for Will Jefferson.

Lasith Malinga leads the bowlers

It’s nice to see bowlers being decisive in a Twenty20 match. Far too often they might as well just glue different mugshots onto a bowling machine and use that instead.

In the Champions League final, Mumbai successfully defended 139. For a large proportion of the match, the commentators were talking up Chris Gayle and how amazing a Twenty20 batsman he is. Gayle is amazing, but he specialises in hitting sixes slightly more frequently and slightly more reliably than other six-hitting batsmen. It might seem like he’s the perfect Twenty20 player because of that, but even the sport’s ball-whoppiest format presents different challenges from time to time.

Gayle was actually dismissed by Harbhajan Singh, who finished with the best figures (3-20), but it was Lasith Malinga who stood out, not least because he’d also seemed like a monumental stumbling block for Somerset in the semi final.

In that match, the Zoidermen had needed 29 runs from 18 balls, 12 of which were to be bowled by Malinga. Based on how he was bowling, they basically concluded that they needed to score 14 off his two overs and 15 off the other, no matter who bowled it. Some have been at pains to stress the importance of James Franklin’s performance, but we’d give half the credit for that over to the Malinga-enforced run recalculation.

A good pitch in Galle in Sri Lanka

We haven’t seen today’s play in the first Test between Sri Lanka and Australia, but having seen yesterday’s we’re opting to be quietly impressed rather than blown away by Nathan Lyon’s debut, despite the fact that he took 5-34 in Sri Lanka’s first innings. Why? Because he is bowling on a good pitch.

There has been a spate of good pitches recently – a few in England and a handful in the West Indies. It’s good to now see one in Sri Lanka, where pitches can sometimes be as threatening as a massage.

Test cricket is all the better for this development, because games are progressing. You actually have to keep checking the score. For example, Australia have lost a wicket while we’ve been typing. Just as importantly, better batsmen thrive while mediocre ones depart as rapidly as a guilty rocket.

When Mohammad Sami can Anil Kumble for six, Test cricket loses a little of its lustre. Let’s have no more of that crap.

Sanath Jayasuriya’s last match

Sanath Jayasuriya has finally bowed out of cricket just three days short of his 70th birthday. He departed how he had thrived, with a ferocious cut shot.

Asked to reflect on his career, Jayasuriya may or may not have said:

“Eh? What? Speak up. Why does everybody mumble these days? Is it too much to ask that people speak clearly and audibly? You’re all too busy playing with your iTelephones and Sony PlayMachines to enunciate properly. What’s the world coming to? Bring back conscription, that’s what I say.”

Kumar Sangakkara and holes in batting averages

Building a reputation as a batsman is not unlike being a contestant on the perennially disappointing Nineties game show, The Crystal Maze.

You spend your life in the nets, honing your technique and earning crystals and then you get to try and make the most of it in the Crystal Dome of Test cricket.

The gold and silver tokens represent your performance in every conceivable circumstance against every possible opponent and as they billow around you, the best you can do is clutch blindly and madly, hoping you end up with enough to seal your reputation. After a while, Richard O’Brien yells “Stop the fans!” and then the world’s amateur cricket analysts scrutinise your bounty.

“Have you got the ’scoring runs in England’ token?” they ask Kumar Sangakkara. “I’ve got the silver one, not the gold,” he replies.

Sangakkara can be fairly pleased with that. You can’t get all the tokens. There are too many to hold and half of them you won’t even have seen while you were in the Crystal Dome. Test cricket token acquisition is largely an exercise in damage limitation.

Even Don Bradman missed tokens. He thought he’d done well, but then after he retired they started adding tokens for Test matches played in places other than England or Australia, so he had none of those.

Return of Sangakkara – this time it’s temporary and he doesn’t really want to do it

It’s not a great film title, but we’d watch. We will watch, in fact.

Kumar Sangakkara had two years as captain, but, like Mahela Jayawardene before him, jacked the job in because of the pressure. Unfortunately, Tillakaratne Dilshan’s minced thumb has meant Sri Lanka need a stand-in and after much ‘ah, come on, there has to be somebody else,’ Sangakkara is back.

Political interference is often cited as being one of the reasons why the Sri Lanka captaincy is such a pain in the balls, but it’s all a bit vague. Is it more than that?

The lack of concrete information sets your mind on a path that leads to images of suited men cheering as the Sri Lanka cricket captain unicycles semi-naked. After bringing them all cocktails served in tankards made out of polar bear feet, the men make him dance a tearful jig while pelting him with slugs.

Assuming that’s all factual, you can see why Kumar Sangakkara doesn’t want the job.

Benevolent Uncle Sanath is back

At the age of 41.

Sam emailed to say:

“I might write something about how he’s really old and he’s like everyone’s uncle and he’s, like, properly old.”

We asked what he might conceivably add to that sentence.

Sam concluded that there was nothing to add.

Tillakaratne Dilshan pans a hundred and is arsed about it

Tillakaratne Dilshan celebrated enthusiastically when he reached his hundred. Some will say it was because he’d got his name on the honours board at Lord’s, but we doubt that.

Dilshan is the Sri Lanka captain and his team had embarrassed themselves in Cardiff and then done little to repair their reputation at Lord’s. This Test has been hard work for him and he’d had little to show for it until he reached three figures.

Being man of the match in a Twenty20 match doubtless gives you greater material rewards than a Test hundred like Dilshan’s, but it doesn’t necessarily take a great deal of effort during the match itself. Sometimes all you need to do is bat fairly sensibly for a dozen overs when chasing a small total – that’s little more than doing your job.

At Lord’s, Dilshan has made a substantial physical investment, having spent 13 hours on the field so far; but more significantly, he’s made a huge emotional investment over that period of time. That’s why he was so arsed about his hundred and that’s why those of us who follow these matches are more arsed about such achievements as well

Sri Lanka slightly taken aback by England attack

Imagine you’re Sri Lanka. You’re four days into the world’s most uneventful bike ride. You’re in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain on a beautiful flat road and you can clearly see that there is nothing threatening for 50 miles in any direction.

You’re tootling along at about 8mph feeling relaxed, satisfied, but a little bit bored, when suddenly a European mole emerges from the immaculate tarmac in front of you. Shit!

You swerve and tumble off your bike, skinning your knees. Ooh, that smarts. As you pick yourself up, you see the mole ambling towards you. Maybe he’s coming to check whether you’re okay.

The mole kicks you in the balls.

Then he does it nine more times.