Sri Lanka

Murali’s batting

Murali’s always had a certain approach to batting.

• Have a ruddy great swing at the ball
• Miss
• Have an even bigger swing at the next one

Usually this method fails for reasons that are fairly clear even to Murali. Occasionally it doesn’t and he hits 33 off 16 balls to win a match, as happened yesterday against Bangladesh.

It’s perversely heart-warming that after 447 international matches, no-one has managed to coach even the slightest bit of batting caution or batting reason into the man. It’s even more heart-warming that he can, on occasion, be entirely vindicated in his approach, even if it’s only once every 200-or-so matches.

Sachin Tendulkar has the most Test runs

No-one’s scored more Test runs than Sachin Tendulkar and after passing Brian Lara’s record, he went on to pass 12,000 runs as well. We’d say that he was the first to do so, but you can probably deduce that easily enough.

It is very hard to express the significance of this. It’s just huge numbers, isn’t it? When numbers are that huge, how do you gauge their worth? The man himself is the only one who knows what it took and he put it best:

“It’s definitely the biggest milestone because it’s taken me 19 years to get.”

That’s a long time. If you devoted yourself to digging a hole for 19 years, you’d have one hell of a hole. You’d be pretty pleased with your hole. You’d climb out and step back to admire your handiwork, at which point you’d fall down a hole twice the size. This would be Sachin Tendulkar’s hole.

You don’t feel so good about your hole now, do you? You thought you were good at digging holes, but you’re not. Sachin Tendulkar’s got a better technique; he’s stronger, fitter and faster than you and after he’d been doing it for a while, someone gave him a better shovel.

You’re reading about the Test when there’s Twenty20 on?

There are two articles. One says Twenty20′s clearly going to kill Test cricket. One says that probably, on balance, that won’t happen. Newspaper editors will tend to publish the first one.

The former’s punchier and it provokes debate, so we get to read a disproportionate number of articles about how Test cricket’s in mortal danger. Our feeling is that it’s a testing time for the longer format, but that basically everything will work out fine (and we call ourself a pessimist – we should buck our ideas up in that department).

We tend to think that Twenty20 could function as a ‘gateway’ format, leading people into the game. Let’s be honest, Twenty20′s fun, but if you’re going to get into the sport properly, Tests are just fundamentally better, aren’t they? There’s just more to pore over.

There are international Twenty20 games going on at the moment. Pakistan played Sri Lanka on Saturday. Is anyone – even Pakistanis or Sri Lankans – more interested in that match than the India v Australia Tests?

Okay, India v Australia is a biggie and okay, Twenty20′s more of a club/franchise thing than an international thing – but still. We’re not saying there’s no danger and that the huge sums of money aren’t going to play a part, but we do get the feeling the whole threat thing is a bit overstated.

It’ll be fine.

Zaheer Khan wins an ODI with the ball

Another one-day international is decided with the ball. Huzzah. It went the other way this time, however.

Zaheer Khan took 4-21 and Sri Lanka crumpled like a supermarket receipt to 142 all out. We’re increasingly thinking that if there’s swing, you want Zaheer Khan in your side.

Bowlers continued to lord it over meek batsmen when India batted, but the target was reached in no-style-at-all with seven wickets down.

This is what one-day cricket’s all about: shambling, spazzy run-chases.

India change their batting faces to no great effect

‘Bye bye Sachin, Rahul, Sourav and VVS, the new generation are here now. You guys are past it, but we’ll conquer Ajantha Mendis and Muttiah Muralitharan with ease.’

This is what India’s glittery one-day batting line-up might have said, but it would have been followed by a bit of a frown and a muttered ‘balls’, after Yuvraj Singh top-scored with 23 (six of which were scored in a blind panic while waiting to be clean bowled in Mendis’s first over).

Most media outlets will doubtless paint this as the next chapter in March of the Mendis, but all the Sri Lankan bowlers chipped in.

Our angle would be how deeply satisfying it is to see one-day matches being decided by bowlers for once. We don’t do angles though. We just witter aimlessly and then maybe tail off with an unnecessarily long and uninformative sentence that would perhaps be removed if it were to appear as the final words of a piece in a more respectable and professional publication.

Mendissed-out

We can’t believe none of you have got anything to say about Andrew Strauss’s slow transformation into a slightly defective Blockatron 9000. We were sure you’d have strong feelings about that.

How about Sri Lanka beating India? Have you got thoughts about that?

We’re rather hoping that you do, because we’re a bit Mendissed-out and aren’t going to bother. Unless we do something about India deserving it because they don’t much care about Tests…

No. It would end up too dull. We can see it already.

Virender Sehwag defies pretty much everyone and everything

Murali. Vaas. Mendis. A pitch with one wet end and one cracked end. Rain. Reason. Virender Sehwag defied them all.

Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly mustered seven between them. Gautam Gambhir had a lot of luck to edge his way to 56. VVS Laxman hung around for a bit. The tail folded. Meanwhile Virender Sehwag careered along to 201 not out, like a giraffe on rollerskates going down a hell of a steep hill. He should fall, but he doesn’t. He just keeps on accelerating.

You’ve got to admire his reasoning: ‘Hmm. It’s doing a bit. Best keep panning the ball as hard as I can like usual.’

And he’s bald. There’s no way he’s related to Sanath Jayasuriya is there?

Sri Lankan tactics

Sri Lanka have always had a good plan when playing at home, but it did have one slight flaw. Someone had to bowl at the other end.

If you’re a touring side batting in a Test in Sri Lanka, you effectively play two different matches. At one end, you counter the quick bowlers and the back-up spinner and probably acquit yourself quite well. At the other end you whimper and get out. No shame in that. That’s just facing Murali on his turf. The mistake you made was taking that single and changing ends.

Now though, there’s Ajantha Mendis, so when batting you now have a choice. Do you get out to Murali or do you get out to Mendis?

The Sri Lankan tactic was carried out to perfection last week. 600-6 when they batted and then India were out for 223 and 138. Murali took 5-84 and 6-26. Ajantha Mendis took 4-72 and 4-60. Chaminda Vaas got through ten overs in the entire match.

India, after hurting England last summer and then scaring Australia earlier this year seem to be deteriorating. Swanning around in the IPL like you’re entitled to one fat slice of everything in the entire world is asking for it though.

It all started when they hired a hubris coach for one-on-one sessions with each of the players. They should never have done that. What did they think would happen?

It’s Mahela Jayawardene at the SSC. Again.

If Sanath Jayasuriya’s catchphrase would be ‘ha-haaaa‘, then Mahela Jayawardene’s ought to be just silence. He’s not speaking because he’s concentrating.

Jayawardene averages near enough a hundred at Galle, but it’s at the Sinhalese Sports Club Ground that he REALLY likes batting. No-one’s ever scored more Test runs at a single ground than Jayawardene at the SSC.

The last four times he’s gone to the crease in a Test match there, he’s scored a hundred. The first of those innings was 374 and the most recent, yesterday, was his ninth SSC Test hundred.

It must be really satisfying for the Sri Lankans when they’re playing at home to have a tactic that they can rely on so completely. Bat the opposition to tears, hope to fluke a wicket with the new ball and then let Murali bowl for three days solid.

As plans go, it’s not got much subtlety, but granite hasn’t got much subtlety and granite’s one of the great success stories. Look at it sitting there – the smug, igneous bastard.

Malinda Warnapura’s hundred unexpectedly delights us

We think we might have subconsciously adopted Malinda Warnapura and we’ve no real idea when it happened or why. All we know is that he scored a hundred against India today and we thought ‘well played our guy’.

At that point we stopped. ‘Wait a minute, why are we thinking of him as ‘our guy’?’ A quick check of the King Cricket archives revealed no eating competition victories and no sign that he’s sociopathically oblivious to the world around him – like Shahid Afridi with his expert grasp on match situations and how to bat accordingly. Nothing.

We can only think it’s something to do with him having played league cricket in Yorkshire, but that doesn’t seem like much of a reason. Does it?