By Sa’adi Thawfeeq

Sri Lanka Cricket Head Coach Mickey Arthur

There was a time when Sri Lanka (SL) worried a lot about their bowling combinations to bowl sides out, but over time whereas we have improved in that department, the batting, which has been our forte since achieving Test status 40 years ago, has certainly taken a dip, and quite alarmingly at that.

Since the retirements of batsmen in the calibre of Tillakaratne Dilshan, Thilan Samaraweera, Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara in the past eight years, SL has been found desperately wanting of quality batsmen who could score consistently. The degeneration of such batsmen has had an overbearing effect on the results obtained in Test cricket, where SL’s performance can be termed mediocre in comparison to what they achieved prior to 2015, when the last of the four batsmen mentioned retired from the Test scene.

What we have today is a group of batsmen whose performances are inconsistent as the country’s weather, exemplified by none other than battling batting sensation Kusal Mendis and wicket-keeper batsman Niroshan Dickwella, who is currently ranked second in terms of most runs scored in test cricket without reaching a century. Otherwise, how can you substantiate such an average batting performance in the recently concluded two Tests against England where the batsmen performed in a ‘blow hot blow cold’ manner. The SL batsmen put up quite magnificent performances in the second innings of the first Test and the first innings of the second Test, which starred Lahiru Thirimanne and Angelo Mathews respectively, but all that brilliant work was negated by their substandard batting in the other two innings where they were bundled out for totals of 135 and 126. Thanks to their poor batting in the second innings of the second Test, SL lost a golden chance of drawing the two-Test series against England and instead lost it 0-2.

Head Coach Mickey Arthur has put it down to the batsmen not trusting their defence. 

“Test batting is very much about your defence. You’ve got to trust it first and foremost and your attacking shots come from your defence. When we play at a frantic pace like we played (on Monday), the only thing it tells me is that we don’t seem to trust our defence enough on a wicket like that.”

“I was asked earlier why we didn’t play with intent. I think we didn’t trust our defence enough on a wicket like that so we thought we had to attack to survive. I want to sit with them and ask why their defence is not good enough; it’s just a little bit about belief. Those are some things I am going to delve into and start talking about with the players and formulating game plans around it.”

“Angelo (Mathews) in the first innings of this Test and the second innings of the first Test, along with (Lahiru) Thirimanne and Kusal Janith for a period of time, really trusted their defence; that was one of our key mentors. I’ve watched the guys train and they are certainly good enough,” said Arthur.

Although Arthur has been with the national team for a year, he has overseen only three Test series.

“I’ve been working in Sri Lanka for a year now, but this is only my third Test series. I am still getting to find out about the guys. The plusses for us were certainly that first innings (against South Africa) at the Centurion we were outstanding, our batting was excellent; so disappointed we got all the injuries. We had a hundred at the Wanderers with Dimuth (Karunaratne), Angelo Mathews in this series has been outstanding, so has been Lasith Embuldeniya. 

“We’ve worked really hard with our pace attack and we got a very good one with six very good pace bowlers, very good spinners, some finger spinners, wrist spinners and it’s just going to be for me getting our batters in the right frame to score enough runs. I do think we got the bowling attack and the batting is about us just going back and assessing the game plans,” Arthur said.

“We need to start playing from the front, need to be able to win the moments that present themselves to really put the opposition under pressure and every time we get into that position the opposition can’t win the next session. That’s something that we are going to work on. There have been a number of positives individually but now it’s time for us to collectively have some positives because we need to win cricket games.”

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