Captain Amla keeps Sri Lanka in the test
A SKY alive with fluttering frivolity took the edge off the grim battle on the ground as the first test between Sri Lanka and SA oozed towards conclusion in Galle yesterday.
Besides the fourth day of the match, yesterday also served up a kite festival. For much of the afternoon, scores of brightly coloured craft were piloted from the ramparts of the fort that overlooks the ground.
Down below, nothing so carefree was going on. Sri Lanka bobbed somewhere between seriousness and survival to reach 110/1 at stumps. Today, they will need a proper plan if they are to score the 260 runs they need.
The target of 370 that Hashim Amla set the home side when he declared at tea yesterday seems too skinny for its jeans, but no team has yet made that many in any kind of fourth innings on this curmudgeonly ground.
The highest successful chase here is the 96 Sri Lanka scored to beat India in July 2010. Pakistan made 300 in June 2012, but they were defeated.
“We needed to keep them in the game,” Russell Domingo said. “If we had batted for an hour more and got a lead of 440, you would have said, ‘Ag, you guys are boring’.”
Domingo’s counterpart, Marvan Atapattu, said his team, freshly buoyed by their first series win in England last month, felt the contest was alive: “We don’t go down without a fight. The thinking has changed.”
SA have yet to cross swords with Mahela Jayawardene, but Kumar Sangakkara has made a patient 58 not out — a far cry from the petulance he showed before getting himself out for 24 in the first innings.
Was Sangakkara looking to redeem that performance? “He’s disappointed every time he doesn’t get a hundred,” said Atapattu.
That done, talk turned to Vernon Philander becoming the second SA player in eight months to be done for ball tampering. Were SA developing a reputation for this dark art?
“I’d hate to say that other sides are probably a bit better at doing it than we are,” Domingo said. “It’s something we don’t try and intentionally do.”
Philander, Domingo said, had maintained he was “cleaning the ball”. Why, then, had he chosen not to contest the charge? “Admitting guilt is almost as though (we’re saying) let’s move on and focus on what we are going to do here.”
What would Atapattu say to one of his bowlers who had been bust for ball tampering? “I don’t even have to think about it because they won’t do it.”
In other words, go fly a kite.
WE were in the midst of the madness of crossing Custom Street when a man made us an offer he thought we could not refuse: “In through the main gate. Only 100.”
Around us swarmed buses, minibuses, motorbikes, scooters, trucks, tuk-tuks, taxis, bicycles, perambulating pedestrians with parasols, beggars, paunchy punctilious policemen, dogged dogs, catatonic cats, crotchety crows and all. They came from at least 47 points of a three-pronged intersection, and they kept coming.
Behind us, 426 years of chiselled, towering, magnificent history called the Galle Fort sighed silently: it had gazed down on all this before.
In front of us, through a wire fence, we saw Billy Bowden walk a line as crooked as his finger to the middle of the ground.
Bowden’s colleague, Richard Kettleborough, strode more straightly to the same destination. Together they were about to get another day going in the first test between Sri Lanka and SA.
The ground’s main gate was 250m away on a seriously sunny day. Entry to the match was free. If we did not need a ride and we did not need tickets, what was our man with a plan hoping to be paid 100 rupees to do?
We declined the offer and, having somehow survived crossing Custom Street, continued on our own sweaty steam. But questions hung in the warm, wet air: did we look gormless enough to buy free tickets or unfit enough to need transport for so short a journey? Or what?
Could it be that we stuck out as too obviously South African and therefore likely to be spooked into parting with cash to ward off the evil of anything that smacked of unorthodoxy, like passers-by being able to watch a test through a fence and, if they fancied it, pop in for an over or 90 without having to purchase a ticket.
Fine. That’s a reach. But SA’s cricket culture is hung up on orthodoxy in ways that Sri Lanka’s is not.
What would have happened, for instance, if Muttiah Muralitharan or Lasith Malinga had been South African? They would have been prescribed remedial coaching until their actions were straightened out and, probably, have lost what made them champion bowlers.
Conversely, if Hashim Amla had grown up in Sri Lanka he would still have his crooked back-lift. We know he is a wonderful player who will add a pile of runs to the mountain he has already scored, but how do we know he would not have been an even better batsman if his back-lift had not provoked dire disapproval from the orthodoxy police?
Sri Lankan cricket is far from perfect. The board allowed their debt to balloon to $70-million before they tried to stop the bleeding, the players went unpaid for eight months of 2011, and the governance problems and politics in the game here make SA’s look like a Disney movie.
If Sri Lanka had the financial means to commercialise the soul out of the game, as is happening in other countries, including SA, they would. Instead, they have unorthodox ideas. Like covering the entire field, not just the pitch area, each evening and laying foam rubber on the pitch under the cover to minimise sweating and maximise their spin advantage.
Sri Lankans know when they are on to a good thing.