Mumbai: India being 42-0 in 10 overs out of 300/5 in 85 overs is not remarkable by itself. This spell of play, though, in the middle of Day 1 of the second Test where Sri Lanka employed the leg theory, will stick out for the home team’s defensive mindset.
After being out-bowled by the visiting spinners at Galle in the first Test, Sri Lanka stuck to playing four specialist bowlers at Colombo. Having played 46 previous matches at the Sinhalese Sports Club Ground, they would have known exactly what’s best for the surface. Prabhat Jayasuriya and Keshara Nuwantha were their primary spinners and one would have thought of their wicket-taking options.
Strangely, at the first sighting of a threatening partnership between Shubman Gill and Devdutt Padikkal for the third wicket, at 142-2 in 40 overs, Sri Lanka skipper Dhananjaya de Silva summoned left-arm spinner Jayasuriya and off-spinner Nuwantha, to bowl wide outside the leg stump to the right-left handed pair. Now, the rule about a ball pitched outside leg eliminating the lbw has been in force since 1839.
And neither of the spinners were aiming to be Ashley Giles to Sachin Tendulkar, the last noteworthy occasion when the tactics truly worked.
In that Bengaluru Test match in 2001, Tendulkar was well set on Day 3 and England skipper Nasser Hussain saw merit in playing with the ego of the leading batter of the time. Left-arm spinner Giles eventually had Tendulkar stumped.
In Colombo, this was Day 1. Admittedly, the pitch was playing no tricks. The Kookaburra ball had softened considerably. There was less turn and no drift on offer as in the windy seaside venue of Galle.
But Gill and Padikkal were happy to keep their ego aside for a larger cause. Having seen the openers squander away good starts, they were determined not to react to the negative lines even as Jayasuriya and Nuwantha kept pitching it wide outside leg-stump. There was no real turn on offer, no rough to exploit, so early from the SSC strip.
Once the umpires were convinced these were deliberate negative tactics, they began penalising the tactic. In the 49th over, Jayasuriya bowled a hat-trick of wides, the ball pitched so wide that Gill didn’t even have to pad it away. The SSC ground wasn’t packed with fans or else one doesn’t not know how they would have reacted.
There was a similar mini-spell of play when the second new ball was due and it made perfect sense to bide time at that time.
Centurion Padikkal was so good that he brought out the reverse sweep for the first time in the 68th over when he finally had some rough to contend with. Gill too did not take the bait. The home side, still with a fair chance of calling the shots, chose to waste large phases of the second session without any intent of picking up wickets. As it turned out, they didn’t even manage to stem the run flow. India scored at a faster rate in those overs than their average scoring rate of the day (3.52).
When Sri Lanka finally got serious at the stroke of tea and brought back pacer Asitha Fernando, he induced an outside edge off Gill. It wasn’t the best of deliveries but a timely reminder to Sri Lanka of the myriad ways of making inroads. That Day 1 action is about making advances, not retreating even before the battle heats up.
