Sri Lanka v England, 3rd Test, Colombo, 23-27 November, 2018

If these two put on another 50 runs, things will start to get interesting.

One wicket should trigger a collapse.

taipan wrote:One wicket should trigger a collapse.

You would think so but England look like they are playing as if they've already won to me. The pitch doesn't seem to have got any worse the past 2 days.

taipan wrote:Opener
Opener
Bairstow
Root
Stokes
Buttler
Foakes!
Moeen
Curran
Broad
Anderson

Looks right.

How very sporting of both sides to ensure that I have some live cricket to watch before I go to work.

taipan wrote:One wicket should trigger a collapse.

Yup.

A run out of all things.

Basil wrote:How very sporting of both sides to ensure that I have some live cricket to watch before I go to work.

Retire and you have plenty of time to watch.

Bit of a scary last wicket stand for Lanka. They need another 45.

This has been a really entertaining series. I still think England will get the whitewash pretty soon but Sri Lanka have made a really good go of this.

breaks usually do more harm than good

Pretty mad stat from BBC:

"England have now had winning margins of less than 60 runs in four of the last eight Test matches.

To give you some context the four previous times that had happened were span over 243 Tests."

Terrific series.

Congrats to England on 3-0. A great result.

taipan wrote:

Basil wrote:How very sporting of both sides to ensure that I have some live cricket to watch before I go to work.

Retire and you have plenty of time to watch.

That will have to wait sadly.

Basil wrote:

taipan wrote:

Basil wrote:How very sporting of both sides to ensure that I have some live cricket to watch before I go to work.

Retire and you have plenty of time to watch.

That will have to wait sadly.

Yeah, I guess the Sky subscriptions don’t get any cheaper... and if you want non-essentials like food as well as cricket, that’s probably a few more years of work...

Some solid progress in certain areas from England.

And a fillip for Root, an embattled captain lately, who has shown a decent mixture of plan and adventure, even when it isn't going quite right.

"Clean sweeps" always look like a trouncing retrospectively, once a series is over .... in the stats, in the record books.

But when you witness it, it's rarely the case that one team was entirely brilliant and the other completely useless throughout. (See the recent history of the Ashes for examples of how "whitewashes" can be misleading. One team is generally a bit better, sometimes only a slight bit better than the other, but has the greater confidence, two or three standout players, or a group cohesion/belief that gets them out of the tight spots their opponents don't emerge from. And second: if you pretend a clean sweep is a rubberstamp for a triumphal, more or less preordained side and set of strategies in the next series, you can get an unpleasant shock.)


Spare a thought for Sri Lanka, then.

Well, I will.

A team in transition (hopefully) between old and new. They went into this series expecting to get their captain (and a leading batsman) back at some stage, but never did. They suffered disorientation as well as England in the First Test, improved in terms of the spirit and application many of them showed, if not exactly consistently, in Tests 2 and 3.

But how they missed Chandimal.

In his absence, Dickwella took over as a team bawler and review waster, rather than a team motivator, as keepers typically are - being literally as well as metaphorically central in the field.

Lakmal appeared almost a born non-leader, like someone who didn't really want the job, and knew even less what to do with it. And would have been much happier just bowling his overs, and possibly chipping in occasionally with the bat. You wonder whether the captaincy was handed to him just on the basis of some rule of seniority: that central disorientation seemed a big handicap from the start.

Mathews, good as he was, and still occasionally is, seems to live a semi-detached existence in the team.

You hope for Sri Lanka they start to get it together a bit better. They may have lost the famous stars, but they still can play, given purpose and a sense of team.