< 1 minute read Remember Ajantha Mendis? That’s kind of died down a bit, hasn’t it? He isn’t even in the Sri Lanka squad. There seems to be an assumption that India will win the second semi-final. They’ve been playing very well and they look the stronger team with a greater number of high
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Sri Lanka are better than Australia
< 1 minute read It’s funny how you can rely on the guys who’ve played 300-and-odd one-day internationals in these major tournaments. And by ‘funny’ we of course mean ‘predictable’. Mahela Jayawardene has played so many one-dayers that his average (33.40) is meaningless. What you actually need to do is split his career into
Continue readingSri Lanka are better than England
< 1 minute read That Kumar Sangakkara, eh? He can bat. There’s a decent chance he’s set things up for the perfect England home tournament exit as well where they are ejected after one loss and a bit of rain without having done too much wrong. It’s the way it should be: incomplete and
Continue readingNew Zealand are better than Sri Lanka
< 1 minute read But not by a huge amount. Chasing 139 to win, you’d hope to get there without losing nine wickets. Then again, they didn’t lose ten, so what’s the problem? A really bad run chase is a wonderful thing. A big run chase is faintly absorbing, but for real tension you
Continue readingSri Lanka’s new ball attack
< 1 minute read Australians aren’t always particularly polite about the standard of the opposition. In a way, this is okay, because they’re equally happy to wheel out brutal opinions about their own team when they don’t do well. On the other hand, it does mean that the rest of us can portray dismissive
Continue readingMarlon Samuels v Lasith Malinga
2 minute read We’ll be honest. Sri Lanka were steady-for-one when we got in the shower. We thought we’d timed it well. We hadn’t. The World Twenty20 final was an odd one. Sri Lankan run-scoring was stymied and they appeared to be waiting for a particular bowler to hit. He never turned up,
Continue readingIs a draw in Sri Lanka a good result?
< 1 minute read Historically, a drawn Test series in Sri Lanka is a pretty good result for England. Set against that is the fact that Muttiah Muralitharan doesn’t play any more. Sri Lanka’s bowlers are a bit middling. Should England have done better? Well we’re pretty happy with a draw, particularly after watching
Continue readingMahela Jayawardene v England
< 1 minute read As abysmal as England’s batsmen have been, the team would stand a pretty decent chance of beating Sri Lanka if they didn’t spend most of their time in the field attempting to dismiss just one of the two batsmen at the crease. If they’re in Sri Lanka, England are probably
Continue readingLahiru Thirimanne makes himself big
2 minute read Brace yourself, we’re going to mention football. One thing we learned from our years watching that soap opera-cum-sport is that a goalie should ‘make himself big’ when a forward is bearing down on him. The purpose of this is not, as you might think, to ward off predators. It is
Continue readingPlaying the long game in Sri Lanka
< 1 minute read Samit Patel’s cricket statistics are being weighed against his vital statistics even more frequently of late. Is he fit enough for five-day cricket? It’s an interesting question, but we’re actually more interested in how the other England players cope. Even if Patel plays, we can’t see a debutant playing the
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