Lunch India 442 for 5 (Ashwin 47*, Saha 16*) v Sri Lanka
India lost their centurions, one at the start of play, and the other about half an hour to lunch, but Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane had done enough to decorate the scoreboard with 442 runs. As much as Sri Lanka might be pleased with the wickets, their own batsmen might start to eye the pitch with suspicion. It had begun puffing up clouds of dust like a steam train from the sixties.
Armed with that knowledge, India’s lower order, so strong that they have an allrounder at No. 9, continued to attack the bowling. R Ashwin got off the mark with an airy boundary behind point. He was unbeaten on 47. Wriddhiman Saha had watched a team-mate being stumped after haring down the track, but that had no bearing on his move to do the same and swat his fourth ball to the long-on boundary. India missed scoring a hundred in each session of this Test by only two little runs.
Sri Lanka began the morning a bowler short – Nuwan Pradeep, the only specialist seamer and taker of six wickets in Galle, was down with a hamstring injury. And to make up for his loss, they gave their opening batsman the second new ball. Dimuth Karunarante responded with a nip-backer that pinned Pujara in front of the stumps in the second over of the day for the first wicket of his career. He only had to wait 41 Tests, and the time it took to overrule umpire Bruce Oxenford’s on-field decision by DRS.
So the man who had struck three centuries in three Tests in this country, bested Dhammika Prasad on a green seamer in 2015, and Rangana Herath on this soon-to-be dust bowl, fell to a man who was bowling for only the second time in Test cricket. It was a bit like Pujara had leapt over the alligators in the moat, squeezed into the gap just as the draw bridge closed, slid down it with his arms raised aloft at a successful breach only to crash headlong into a guard sleeping against the wall.
So Rahane took the lead of the invasion, progressing smoothly until he found fit to attack debutant Malinda Pushpakumara in the 111th over. Three balls previously, the left-arm spinner had pushed one past the outside edge, and in an effort to reverse the pressure, Rahane danced down the track only to be deceived in flight and then mugged by sharp turn. Pushpakumara screamed as only a man who had until then been treated like a defective Herath clone could. It was his first Test wicket, his 559th in first-class games.
The original was starting to struggle too. Short balls from Herath once seemed like a set-up – like when someone points at your chest and screams “what’s that?!” before flicking your nose. But now they are just reminders that the great man is nearly 40 years old and is perhaps not putting as much body into his action as he used to. Only 12 times out of a sample size of 86 has he had to settle for a one-wicket haul in Sri Lanka. India have already made him suffer through that in Galle, and they would want to do it again in Colombo.
Alagappan Muthu is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo
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Source: ESPN Crickinfo