As another largely fruitless day in the field away from home developed, Sri Lanka needed someone to shake them into life
Andrew Fidel Fernando at the Wanderers12-Jan-2017Nuwan Pradeep has a face and frame made for sulking. He sulks mid-pitch when a batsman hits him for four. He sulks at long leg when no balls have come his way. By the end of some fielding days, his shoulders are basically being dragged along the ground.Mahela Jayawardene – in his final, feistiest years – routinely used to watch Pradeep from slip and fire verbal mortars in his direction. It’s not that Pradeep was doing anything wrong exactly; it’s more that he just wasn’t doing anything.Even when he is taking wickets and winning matches, Pradeep’s default setting is to sulk. Not everyone will be a bolt of lightning on the field, I suppose, and this just happens to be one of those players who needs his team-mates to fire him up. Today, though, the opposite happened. Sri Lanka’s entire effort seemed to take cues from their least demonstrative man.It was disheartening. To watch this in the field in the third session was like watching soldiers in a foreign land, bone-tired, fighting a battle they don’t think they can win, losing face with their public, worried that their girlfriends have found someone new at home.There was intensive milling around, and non-stop conventional cricket.The Wanderers is one of the bounciest pitches in the world, and Sri Lanka have two bowlers – Pradeep and Lahiru Kumara – who can bowl at more than 140kph, yet it did not occur to them to stack the leg side and at least try a sustained short-ball offensive. Nor did they think to take a page from Pakistan’s book and have bowlers send balls wide of off stump – to starve the batsmen out. Instead there was the fifth-stump line all day long, waiting for the pitch to give them something; the regiment that keeps on charging with their bayonets, while the opposition call their mothers hamsters from the ramparts of a castle.At times in the day, it seemed like Sri Lanka were not even active participants in the game. The cricket was happening to them. Endlessly besieged, resplendently short of ideas, they were mopey, dopey, hands-on-hips victims, waiting to be airlifted out.Of the catch dropped at gully by Dhananjaya de Silva – Hashim Amla had been on 5 – a team-mate would later launch the most tired defence. “We all know Dhananjaya is one of the best fielders in the team,” said Kaushal Silva after play. “It was costly, but those things happen in cricket. We need to move on.”Sri Lanka are not a team that will publicly undermine each other – nor should they be – but a little ire on the field at the time would not have gone unappreciated. Yes, these things happen in cricket, but on away tours, they seem to happen to Sri Lanka more than most.Along with Kumara, of the few fielders who refused to spend the entire day languishing, was Rangana Herath, who stamped around at mid-off, threw himself around for the cause, and yet, has become grumpier by the day on this tour. Who could blame him? South Africa have explicitly made it the groundstaff’s mission to hurt him with pitches that fail to wear. He is Sri Lanka’s ace battle tank on turning tracks, but in this series, South Africa are not fighting a land war – they have moved the conflict out to sea. All Herath can do, really, is traipse back and forth on the beach firing doleful shots in the general direction of the battle, which is happening hundreds of kilometres across the waves.This has been the relentless tone of their work over the past four tours out of Asia. Eight of the nine most-recent away Tests (excluding the tour to Zimbabwe) have been lost. This one, it would seem, would take a fightback on the scale of Kusal Mendis’ 176, or Dinesh Chandimal’s 162, to make something out of.It is a pity they play such insipid cricket away, because in Galle, or Colombo, they are a team that melts stony hearts, and regularly have grizzled men weeping. There are wrist-spinning delights, mischievous counterpunching, and roaring defences of their home bases.But in this series, could it be they have now already checked out? After a day like this, the time seems to be right. Maybe they are ready. Bring the boys back home.
