Tea: Sri Lanka 18 for 2 (Dilruwan 12*, Mathews 4*) trail India 536 for 7 dec (Kohli 243, Vijay 155, Rohit 65, Sandakan 4-167) by 518 runs
Virat Kohli brought up his sixth double-hundred and carried on to post his highest Test score, but the focus of the Delhi Test shifted to the quality of the city’s air on a bizarre second day. Sri Lanka’s fielders came out wearing face masks after lunch, and there were multiple hold-ups in play thereafter as they conveyed to the umpires the difficulty they were having in smoggy conditions.
Their two fast bowlers, Lahiru Gamage and Suranga Lakmal, went off the field midway through their overs, and eventually, during an impasse that brought Sri Lanka’s interim coach Nic Pothas onto the field – their manager Asanka Gurusinha and India coach Ravi Shastri had also made appearances by then – Kohli declared, signalling pointedly that his team was happy to bowl in these conditions.
When India declared, the air quality index (AQI) score at ITO – the area where Feroz Shah Kotla is located – was 205, which falls in the “very unhealthy” category. When Sri Lanka began their innings, it was their offspinning allrounder Dilruwan Perera – rather than Sadeera Samarawickrama, who has been off the field since being struck on the helmet at short leg on day one – who walked out to open alongside Dimuth Karunaratne.
India’s fast bowlers, with a total of 537 behind them, charged in at full tilt in the half hour that remained before tea, and blasted out two wickets. Karunaratne fell to the first ball of the innings, done in by Mohammed Shami, who angled one into the left-hander from around the wicket, hit the pitch hard on a shortish length, and got it to seam away from him. Forced to play by the angle, he feathered an edge through to the keeper.
Then Ishant Sharma, going wide of the crease, did the No. 3 Dhananjaya de Silva for length. Shuffling across the crease and neither coming forward or going back, he jabbed uncertainly at the ball, playing well outside the line, and was struck on the back leg in front of the stumps. His review was unsuccessful, but Sri Lanka retained it, with ball-tracking returning an umpire’s call verdict on height.
India began the day’s play on 371 for 4, and Sri Lanka, having picked up two quick wickets late on day one, may have harboured some hope of clawing their way back into the Test match. If they did, Kohli and Rohit Sharma quelled it with a fifth-wicket partnership of 135. It came to an end off what was to be the second-last ball before lunch, when Rohit fell for 65, bottom-edging a square-cut to the keeper off Lakshan Sandakan.
India lost two more wickets after lunch. Gamage got one with what turned out to be the last ball before the first pollution break, R Ashwin reaching out at a wide one without moving his feet and steering it to gully – it wasn’t the first time he had been dismissed in this manner in the recent past.
Then, in the midst of all the breaks in play, Sri Lanka finally found a way past Kohli. It was Sandakan’s fourth wicket, another good ball amidst an otherwise inconsistent mix, and another reminder of the talent that Sri Lanka will need to nurture with care. Kohli went back to a flat one bowled from left-arm around, perhaps playing the trajectory rather than the length. It skidded on – slow-motion replays indicated it may have been a flipper – and rapped him on the back pad, in front of the stumps. Kohli reviewed, but the ball didn’t have far to travel, and ball-tracking suggested it would have hit a good chunk of leg stump.
If the 87 runs Kohli scored on Sunday didn’t come with quite the same ease as his first 156 on Saturday, it had little to do with Sri Lanka’s bowling, which remained unthreatening and inconsistent. Kohli, instead, had to fight his own body, which was beginning to show the toll taken by scoring three successive Test hundreds. A stiff back slowed him down between wickets, and brought India’s physio onto the field, but Kohli just kept batting.
Sri Lanka persisted with spin for the first six overs of the morning, hoping for Sandakan to conjure up a wicket or two, but neither he nor Dilruwan made any impact on the pair in the middle. Rohit, on 6 overnight, took no time settling in, and launched Sandakan over long-off in the fourth over of the day before picking up two more fours in the next two overs, with a late-cut and a sweep.
On came the second new ball, 16 overs after it became available, and Kohli clipped Lakmal’s first ball to the midwicket boundary. If that ball was too full and too straight, the next one was just about perfect: an outswinger in the channel outside off stump and provoking a rare play-and-miss from Kohli. Unfortunately for Sri Lanka, their bowlers never could string together a sustained chain of testing deliveries, and the new ball ended up leaking runs. Lakmal and Gamage conceded 32 in six overs – including six fours, the pick of them a pull from Rohit off Gamage, just wide of mid-on – before Dilruwan returned to the attack.
As on the first day, there were signs that there was help available for the spinners if they landed it right, and an inside-edge saved Kohli from an otherwise close lbw shout against Dilruwan when he was batting on 195. Having survived that, he soon swept past the 200 mark, getting there with a pulled double off Lakmal, and Rohit soon reached his fifty with a straight six off Dilruwan.
Rohit was just beginning to add to Sri Lanka’s worries with his accelerated rate of scoring, with two dabbed fours to third man off Sandakan in the last over before lunch, when an unexpected false shot gave them the smallest measure of solace.
Source: ESPN Crickinfo