DELHI, Wednesday : It would be cruel to state that the loss of champion left-arm spinner Rangana Herath for the third and final cricket Test against India starting here at the Feroz Shah Kotla grounds on December 2 is the least of Sri Lanka’s cricket worries.
Herath and the rest of the bowlers have hardly troubled the Indian batsmen – except perhaps in the first Test in seaming and overcast conditions at Kolkata, but under bright sunny skies at Nagpur the Indian run machine put the Lankan bowlers to the sword compiling a massive 610-6 declared with four batsmen going onto make big hundreds.
Although Herath was very much a part of the Lankan bowling line-up finishing with figures of one for 81 the 39 overs he bowled during the Indian innings took its toll on his 39-year-old frame creaking for salvation from the rigours of international cricket. These are signs that Herath now in his sunset years as a cricketer will not be able to continue for long and Sri Lanka will have to quickly look for an alternative, if not suffer the consequences.
For the second time in three months Herath has complained of a stiff back that has forced him to miss a Test match. The last time it happened was in August and that too at the end of the second Test of a three-match series against India at home. Now here again he has suffered a similar injury at the end of the second Test and has flown home to rest as Sri Lanka has a heavy international Test schedule coming up in 2018 starting with a tour to Bangladesh and then followed by Test series at home and abroad against West Indies, South Africa, England, New Zealand and Australia (in January 2019).
The way the Indian batting juggernaut has been rolling it seems regardless of whom the Lankans pit against them they always have the right cards to play and come up trumps. In other words whether Herath plays or not India are capable of doing what they want. Unlike against Pakistan who find him a threat, the Indian batsmen have negotiated Herath quite confidently denying him the wickets so that the Lankans have to find other options of taking wickets with their thin and inexperienced bowling line up.
Depending on what the Kotla pitch has to offer the Lankans will pick their bowlers to suit it. To replace Herath they have the left-arm chinaman of Lakshan Sandakan and the right-arm leg-spin of uncapped Jeffrey Vandersay who was flown in as a cover for Herath.
The big question for Sri Lanka is not in their bowling, but in their batting where they have not been able to counter the Indian bowling even on batting tracks that has led to a totally one-sided contest in the Test series so far. It’s not that the Indian bowlers have done anything extraordinary, they have only built pressure by denying runs and bowling to a field. The Lankan batsmen have failed miserably to play with a positive mind set to counteract that.
In the first innings of the Nagpur Test, Nic Pothas, the Lankan interim head coach pointed out that six of the dismissals was due to straight balls and he took one step further after the second innings batting debacle to say that the change room has players who keep repeating the same mistakes and called to pick the right players who can perform under pressure.
Thilan Samaraweera the Lankan batting coach was of the view that getting a psychiatrist to talk to the players would clear their minds and make it free. As he correctly pointed out the biggest drawback is that the batsmen don’t trust their own ability. “When one ball behaves badly the mindset of the batsman puts him more under pressure,” he said.
It is the Lankans batting that needs to be cranked up and not so much the bowling because the bowlers have hardly been given a decent total to bowl at. Sri Lanka has never made 300 in their first innings in any of the last five back to back Tests played against India. There lies the root of the problem.
0 comments:
Post a Comment