Looks Like We’re Defensive Off The Pitch Too

Sri Lanka drew the second test against Bangladesh, and honestly on a pitch on which 1600 plus runs were scored, you can hardly blame the Lankans for not winning it. Except of course, that there was a chance that we didn’t capitalise on, and then went on to bitch about Bangladesh.

Let’s look at this Test from Bangla’s point of view. They had just been thrashed by a massive margin in the first Test, and after facing nearly a 600 run deficit in the first innings of the second test, they managed to avoid the follow on and gain some respectability. If I was a Tigers fan, I would have been pretty proud of their effort, especially without Mushfiq.

After Sanga’s mammoth 319, the rest of the Sri Lankan batting didn’t really make use of the ‘road’ type pitch, as Angelo Mathews chose to describe it. Only MJ passed fifty in the first innings apart from Sanga and it wasn’t really a cashing in. Bangladesh came in and survived. It’s pretty impossible to win matches when the opposition bats first and scores 587. Being defensive minded in this situation I can definitely understand. Then SL batted again and batted, and batted. It seemed very much like Chandimal was being given an opportunity to score his 100 and Mathews trying to get 50 on the flat track. I’d like to think that Sri Lanka plays to win and not for individual milestones. But that has hardly ever been true. I can’t think of a single captain who would have declared overnight with his personal score on 334 like Mark Taylor did. And I guess that’s why we are an underachieving team. We don’t play to win. We play to stay in the team, and sometimes you have to sacrifice your individual performance for the team cause.

I’m not really blaming the cricketers themselves for that. It’s a tough place to be especially when the selection criteria is ambivalent at best and usually haphazard. Everyone wants to be undroppable and this is where the problems begin. It’s a cultural thing.

What is upsetting though, is that when SL had the upper hand, and could have scored at 5 an over on the fourth day and put Bangladesh in for 20 overs with a target of 380, they instead batted till twilight to set an unrealistic target of 467 in 98 overs of batting. Expecting a team to score at 4.6 runs an over for a whole day, and blaming them when they don’t, is a little uncharitable I think. I wonder if Steve Waugh’s Australians would have tried to chase that target. They might have. But this Bangladeshi team was never going to do that. 90 or a 100 runs less they might have chased, but this was too much.

Mathews’ argument is that if Pakistan can do it, why couldn’t Bangladesh. For starters they are not as good, and the main reason is that in this game Angelo didn’t have 9 men on the boundary so that the Bangladeshi batsmen could take 3 runs every ball with no risk. So blaming them for not going after the bowling for nearly a hundred overs is a bit much, I think, machan. Calling Bangladesh defensive, after we batted into the tail end of the fourth day was a little ironic, if not downright hypocritical.

Against Pakistan and against Bangladesh, Sri Lanka have surrendered the upper hand and shown a remarkable lack of killer instinct. Nuwan Pradeep who removed Tamim in his first over in the first innings was not given the new ball in the second innings. It was baffling. Really baffling.

I’m not upset about the draw. I’m upset that we didn’t do everything within our control to win the game, and most upset by the fact that we bitched about the other team who were desperately trying to save the game afterwards. Sigh. It is once again reflective of the blame culture, and the refusal to accept any accountability and responsibility. I don’t want to use the team as a metaphor for life in Sri Lanka, but it’s almost impossible not to.