Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Galle
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 more 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 dismissed and 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. We believe we can win a few more tests than in the past.”
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,” Atapattu said.
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.
“I’m sure other sides are probably a little bit better at doing it than we are and it’s maybe something that we (need to) cut out completely. It’s not something that we pride ourselves on; it’s not the way we want to play.
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 and put it behind us.”
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.
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