Sl vs Aus – 2. Test – Stag yourself, it gets spicy in Galle

On By Littum

It comes out of the southwest, the canopies on the large banyan trees in the fort and flutter the flags under the herb tower.

The weather has been burning for several days. There has hardly been a cloud over. And now the hottest sea on the planet is blowing its breath over the cricket plot at Galle, so it happens. This is how you know that drama is about to go down. Signs are, this test is spicy.
Daniel Vettori, veteran of 113 tests, including two in Galle (it would have been more, but this earth lost a few years to 2004 tsunami), had this to say at the end of the day: “First laps go game a huge role In the one who wins this game. But he still clarifies in the disinfected language at a press conference after day: “I just think it will be a difficult wicket all the way along.”

“Difficult”, for most of us, is a key that doesn’t quite fit into the keyhole at first attempt, but if you reach the door against you and lift it up from the ground a little, you can push the thing open. Offreaks, throwing themselves on it straight and rushing past a batter’s ears, occasionally – it’s not just difficult, these are serious warning signs. It’s getting crazy and Sri Lanka has 229 for 9 on the board.

Sri Lanka’s own batting coach Thilina Kandamby believes his fighters should have targeted a total of about 350 and enabled his team to dominate the test. This is very batting-coach requests that always want a pile of first submission runs from which the team can dictate. But Sri Lanka’s fighters were still the same people as they were last week. After being modest for six laps on the trot, it is not as if realistically an earthquake batting screen is on the cards here.
Instead, there are some scary fifties and some useful 30-odds. Dinesh Chandimal Flays Bowlers through offside when they have been already out there. Although generally an excellent sweeper, this is a shot he almost never plays on this surface. In fact, for a lower dominant player, only 18 of his 74 races even got on his leg.

When the top scorer on day one of a test puts some of his most productive shots against spin away, on a earth on which he has played several match -winning laps, we distort ourselves into the world of seriously threatening test matching conditions. Kusal Mendis, who is even more dependent on the sweeping, scored races with the shot, but even he hit almost exclusively with spin. Australia has two left-arm finger spinners in Matthew Kuhnemannan and Cooper Connolly. Almost every race that Mendis scored into the leg was away from a ball that they played with Spin.

While the first test on this same soil Australia made 654 for 7 etc. We are now seeing a very different test match unfolding us. Where in the morning session the hardness of a rolled pitch was not allowed to be huge amounts of spin, in the evening it had begun to take the kind of reversal that is crawling the mind of fighters.

Is a coward now too high risk, given that the bounce spinners can get from a surface like this one, with a little overspin? Is that why Sri Lanka has played three finger spinners in this test to utilize the natural variation that a track like this offers? Wrist spinners are weapons on most surfaces, but Sri Lanka has omitted Jeffrey Vanderersay here. Does control and persistence take over when surfaces are this dry? And if cross-bat shoots like the sweeping and the opposite are too risky, how else do you score on track like this?

As fighters navigate what is obviously the kind of surface that Australia would feel “extreme”, there will be doubts as to whether what worked for the men who scored races in the first test will work again here. The track they are playing on now is only about ten meters from one Australia’s top order, which had only progressed several days ago, and yet it feels like it could be from another galaxy.

And when the wind blows, and the foot marks from the quicks are heavy and dark, and each delivery raises an explosion of dust, there may be drama around the corner. Signs are, this test is spicy.