Eight wickets fell in the first session of play with the Indian spinners snaring the Sri Lankan batsmen leaving them clueless in the first couple of hours. Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja asked too many questions of the Sri Lankan batsmen, to which they didn’t find any answers. The result, Sri Lanka were bundled out for 183 and India decided to enforce the follow-on. Ashwin took a fifer, Ravindra Jadeja as usual was tidy and India looked well poised to finish off things earlier than expected. But, with the second innings came renewed hope and the beginning of a fight back from Sri Lanka.
They did lose their first wicket in the second essay with just seven runs on the board, but Dimuth Karunaratne and Kusal Mendis had other plans. The duo stuck it out in the middle, defending, using their feet, sweeping and taking the odd risk to keep the Indian bowlers at bay. Clearly, this wasn’t a Test match that was getting over in three days much to the hope and expectations of many who had just seen the Lankan batsmen fall down like ninepins in the first innings. R Ashwin applauded the Lankan batsmen for their counter-attack.
“The pitch had a bit of venom in the morning,” analysed Ashwin. “The ball got older and when we bowled the second time around, it was kind of fizzling out and the edges weren’t carrying that much to the fielders. We beat the bat a lot. I thought Mendis batted beautifully. He put Jadeja off his length very quickly. He kept on sweeping him, and he was lucky, he got away with it, but credit to him, he batted beautifully.
“They did bat really well,” he continued. “We beat the bat pretty often even in the sessions we didn’t get wickets. Karunaratne really complimented Mendis, he defended beautifully, and Mendis played a few extra shots that Karunaratne obviously didn’t play. It came off for them. Credit to them, I don’t think we did too much wrong. We tried reverse swing, we bowled cutters in the end and Pandya got the wicket with a cutter. We beat the bat a few times more than we should have for the nicks we got. Hopefully, we will try and nick them off tomorrow.”
When so much was happening in the first session, it was almost as if the second innings would be a mirror image. But the Karunaratne-Mendis duo applied themselves and looked like they would walk back with just one wicket against the team’s score. Mendis did get to the three-figure mark, much to Ashwin’s admiration. The off-spinner believed, day 4 would be a tough day at the office for the bowlers.
“I think this wicket will get slower and slower. It is not going to be easy work tomorrow for sure. We will have to be really disciplined. I thought we gave a few runs more than ideally we should have given today. Tomorrow we can probably try and squeeze them out and try and nip a few wickets up early. Mind you, it is not going to be easy, because it is slowing down at a very quick pace. Edges aren’t carrying, so that means we will have to stick our guns out and try to prise a few wickets out. The second new ball, therefore, becomes important. But as I said they got a great partnership but the guys coming in will have to start from scratch. There is going to be an equal challenge on both sides.”
With not much of assistance in the second innings, adjustments were bound to be made to create wicket-taking opportunities. The big challenge on a turning pitch was to control the amount of turn. “You can change the angles, which I tried from over the stumps. It's pretty difficult because, from the straight there is not a lot happening. It is only a kind of a visual mirage that you're trying to create, try and turn the ball out from the left-hander and get him miss one that's comng straight. Obviously, that didn't happen. With the technology improving more and more, the batsmen are pretty adept at covering their stumps and then probably playing inside the line for ones that are turning away. Like I said, you do try everything in the middle, some day it works, some days it doesn't.
“Changing lengths and lines are both inter-related because if you have to go wider, you'll have to push the ball a little further for it to be a good length and all that. Having said that, we did try and lot of things in the middle today, it was not like a lack of intensity or anything, it was just that a couple of good batsmen batted beautifully.”
