England finally polished off the Sri Lanka tail on Day 5 of the 2nd Test in Kandy after the home side had put up some admirable resistance in pursuit of 301 to win the game and save the series. Angelo Mathews hit 88 and was given strong support by Roshan Silva and Karunaratne to leave Sri Lanka just 80 runs short of their target with 5 wickets in hand at one point. However, England roared back into the game with Moeen Ali and Jack Leach spinning them to a 57 run victory that sealed their first series win in Sri Lanka for 17 years!
A game that should go down as a classic
It's funny how sport and history in general work. This game should really go down in the annals of cricket as a classic match, full of drama and intrigue with moments of brilliance and calamity mixed in equal measure. However, the fact that it was played in Sri Lanka against a mediocre side, at a god-awful time in the morning probably means that only the ardent cricket lovers of the world like myself will still be talking about this game in 6 months time. Perhaps the other reason it might be easily forgotten is that England are delivering some of, if not the most exciting Test cricket around the world at the moment. After a compelling series against India this summer which saw at least 2 of the Tests go right down to the wire, this was another game that ultimately could have ended with victory for either side. This is confirmed by the graphic below that I created using data from CricViz which is an awesome app for cricket and stat lovers alike and uses a huge database of previous matches and results to predict the likelihood of victory for either side at any point in a match.
As you can see for the first 3 days, control of the game flipped from England to Sri Lanka and then back again. At 29-3 in their 2nd innings Sri Lanka seemed dead and buried but by the afternoon of the same day they had worked their way back into the game to the extent that they will probably look back at this as a missed opportunity.
Of course, stats can only tell you part of the story and the reality is that much like India did in the Edgbaston and Rose Bowl Tests this summer, Sri Lanka let key moments in the game slip away whereas England took pretty much all their chances. Go back for example to the late afternoon of Day 1 where Sri Lanka allowed Sam Curran to blitz away for the best part of an hour and add 60 runs with last man James Anderson. Then what about the 5 penalty runs they conceded or the fact that while England have had 3-century makers in 4 innings, Sri Lanka have had none! In general they have lacked the experience, leadership and that little bit of star quality to win this game. However given their mauling in the 1st match and the fact that they lost their captain, best batsman and best bowler in between the games, the home side should actually take more positives from this defeat than they do negatives.
As for England, it was those crucial innings by Buttler, Curran, Root and Foakes alongside the moments of brilliance from Stokes and Jennings in the field that have ultimately won them the match and secured a much needed away win for a side who is still trying to define itself outside of home conditions.
The spinners get the job done - eventually!
Not only are the turning pitches and incredibly hot weather both very alien conditions for England to play in, the overall match situations that they keep finding themselves in are also largely unknown for both the captain and bowlers. I mentioned in my preview of the series that the way that Root managed his spinners would be crucial and that they would need to be at the forefront of his thinking on how to claim 20 wickets as opposed to just an afterthought once the seamers had all had their go. The 19 wickets claimed by England's spinners in the match and the fact that this was only the 11th time in their history England's seamers didn't take a single wicket (11th time in 1,005 Test Matches), indicates that to some extent Root has been successful in his task.
I had indicated prior to the series that I thought that Jack Leach would be the man to watch for England and he has very much turned into England's banker with his greater control of line and length. He has grown into the games as he has gotten overs under his belt which is no real surprise given his wholly inadequate preparation for the tour, the fact that he only had 1 Test Match cap prior to the series beginning and that he spent half of last season injured. His first 5 wicket haul in Tests will only add to his growing confidence and I am still hopeful he will return me the win at odds of 5.0 as England's leading wicket taker
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Moeen Ali is somewhat mercurial with both bat & ball. His performance on Day 4 with was fairly poor but this morning he returned to form and delivered England the victory that they so sorely needed. Moeen seems to be something of a scapegoat for England's flaws and failures. Shunted up & down the order with the bat, dropped as a result of his struggles with the ball and generally regarded as something of a utility player as opposed to a permanent fixture in the side. However, in the last 9 fourth innings that England have bowled in, he has taken 4 or more wickets on 6 occasions. This defines him as the kind of match-winning performer that England must look after a little better if they are to improve as a team over the next couple of years.
Then there's Rashid, a shock recall at the beginning of the summer, a fairly inconsequential perform against India and now relegated to 3rd choice spinner. His performance yesterday was probably his best of the tour as he exerted more sustained pressure on the batsman despite the fact that he didn't get his just rewards. However, with Moeen and Leach ahead of him and a pack of young spinners who are benefiting from the ECB's improvement in pitches and decision to abolish coin tosses, coming up to his rear, you wonder how many more Tests Rashid will play for England?
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However, I was still very frustrated that England managed to let Sri Lanka back into this game and once again I think that their field settings and game plan were very one dimensional. At 26-3, England should have been all over Sri Lanka and looking to wrap this game up as quickly as possible but they persisted with their in/out fields allowing the Sri Lankan batsmen to take singles at ease. Yesterday, I had questioned why it would be the case that for a side so attacking with bat in hand they would be so negative with the ball. The only answer I've managed to come up with is that England currently see the game of Test Match cricket as a series of individual moments. When they are batting the rationale for going for higher risk shots is that the moment that you get an unplayable ball is only just around the corner so you better make runs before it arrives. With their bowling and general tactics in the field, this seems to translate to if we bowl enough overs something will happen and we will be back in the game as a result of one of those moments. It's not really a very pro-active way to approach the sport and is probably testament to the fact that Root is still relatively inexperienced, that England's spinners are more used to playing holding roles as opposed to attacking and that the usual leaders of England's bowling (Anderson & Broad) both prefer to ere on the side of caution.
I was pulling my hair out as a result of the above field placements that England had to Karunaratne while Leach was bowling. Why give him the easy single off his pads and straight down the ground? That's Karunaratne being allowed to play with the spin and work the ball for easy, risk-free runs everytime he beats the man at short-leg. If England had brought those 2 men on the leg-side up and asked Leach to bowl a wider, more attacking line outside off-stump then Karunaratne would have had to have taken more chances against the spin. I've no problem with England then keeping that man back on the cover boundary so that if he does get one away it doesn't cost the bowler and encourages him to keep throwing it in the footmarks outside off-stump. Playing that shot would have been against the spin and high risk for the low reward of just a single.
England on a roll and 13th time lucky!
This match represented a 4th straight Test Match victory for England and a 7th win in their last 8 matches following a run prior to that of 8 Tests without victory including 6 defeats. As I remarked before, this kind of inconsistency is symptomatic of a side that plays with such attacking intent with the bat but a lot of credit also has to go to England for the way they've come back from a disappointing Ashes series and early summer to start winning again. They will now rise to 2nd in the Test match rankings with a real chance of going to number 1 if they can beat the West Indies and India lose in Australia - a 3-0 win or better for Australia against India followed by an English whitewash in the Windies would make England the number 1 side in Test cricket and ODI cricket!
<grammarly-btn>In fact, this entire tour has been England's most successful ever across all formats of the game. They won the 50 over series, the one-off T20 and now the Tests, the first time in their history that they have managed success across all 3 formats in a single bilateral series at this their 13th time of trying! Can the good times keep coming?
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