All the gains from a year of positivity came crashing down in 13.5 overs of witheringly poor judgement
Andrew Fidel Fernando28-Nov-2024When Sri Lanka’s men were about to begin their first innings in Durban, there was a sense that something unusual was happening. It was happening in many little ways. It was happening in some difficult big ones.On the smaller end of the scale, Sri Lanka had sent the Test specialists to Durban two weeks early. Someone in the coaching staff, or perhaps at the High Performance Centre, had noticed this golden chance to get the guys acclimatised and facing hundreds of balls on bouncy South African pitches ahead of schedule. Emails were sent. Meetings were called. Managers were looped in. Operational staff booked flights, hotels, transport.Yet more stones were being turned, and bright ideas had. Neil McKenzie, a dour South Africa batter who could stroke his metaphorical beard and call upon timeless South Africa batting wisdom, was hired as consultant. When the ODI team took an unassailable 2-0 lead in a three-match series against New Zealand, Sri Lanka immediately released four Test players from that squad to give these players an extra day to recover from white-ball labours.Related
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In the medium term, they’d won five Tests this year. Three of those wins had come away from home. One of those victories had featured a four-man seam attack, and only four overs of spin – remarkable for a Sri Lanka side of any era.Their broader achievements are even more impressive. Since 2018, a National Super League domestic competition had significantly improved the standard of cricket at the first-class level. To raise that tournament up, a group of Sri Lanka’s former players, and administrators, had had to wrangle the support of a fractious club system, solve substantial facilities-related dilemmas, and work out quibbles such as player transfers.Improvements such as this have led to 2024’s advances, and why Sri Lanka now have a pace battery, for example, that can deck an opposition in two sessions. It is improvements such as this that have inspired in fans the sense that for once Sri Lankan cricket is doing that thing it almost never does: systematically building to something.When South Africa were all out for 191, you could almost see the path to the World Test Championship final. A decent lead. A good second innings. Sri Lanka being regarded as one of the best teams in the world again.But not if Sri Lanka’s batters were to have anything to do with it. In 13.5 overs of witheringly poor judgement, they crashed like they’ve never crashed before. They hit the snooze button on destiny.Dimuth Karunaratne was out in single digits for the fourth time in his last six Test innings•Associated PressSo much of this innings was an affront. It was an affront to all wisdom of batting on spicy pitches – wisdom accrued over hundreds of years. “Play close to the body when the ball is moving off the surface”, say the batting manuals. “Wait till the ball gets older before venturing the big shots.” Here, instead, Sri Lanka were pushing out to feel ball on bat, driving at deliveries that were both seaming and bouncing, and poking like a drunk camper at a bear.From among the top seven Pathum Nissanka, Kamindu Mendis, and Dhananjaya de Silva all got out to balls they could have left. Angelo Mathews steered a ball well outside off stump beautifully to second slip. It’s not as if they had been pinned. It’s not as if they’d hunkered down, defended, shown fight, and only then run out of patience and fight. The longest of these innings lasted 20 balls.The tail, taking cues from the top order, went down in a hail of big shots themselves. At one point in the innings, it felt as if Sri Lanka had decided they were only going to play shots that sent the ball in the general direction of the slip cordon.This 42 not out was not just record-making in its incompetence, but looks like it will define this match, and has the potential to define the series. It’s like Sri Lanka had built the rocket that would take them to the moon, and on morning of the launch, the chief astronaut got his arm permanently stuck in a vending machine. It’s like they’d just finished replanting an entire forest, then lit up a cigar and set the whole thing ablaze. They’d studied all term and prepared meticulously, and on the day of the exam, got drunk and fell down some stairs.If this 42 all out was the result of Sri Lanka’s batters getting a little ahead of themselves, then it was a reminder to fans that they shouldn’t either. There is a sense that although so many things in Sri Lanka have changed over the last three years, Sri Lanka batters can still unite the nation in bringing palms to faces.In 78 minutes of madness, Sri Lanka’s batters went some way to undoing so much of what they had worked towards.
