Subtlety has served Sri Lanka well, but South Africa’s emphaticism will be hard to beat.
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in London
“THAT’S why,” Herath Mudiyanselage Rangana Keerthi Bandara Herath said, his eyes alive with happiness, his sensible uncle’s fringe undone by honest to goodness toil, his utterly ordinary moustache straining for respectability at the corners of his smile smitten mouth, “we’re laughing at you.”
By which Herath didn’t mean he was laughing at us, the press gathered at Kingsmead on December 29, 2011 to understand what we had seen completed minutes earlier.
He had far more English than we had Sinhala or Tamil, and he was trying, helpfully, to use that superiority to explain how Sri Lanka had won.
In four days. By 208 runs. And that after South Africa had won the previous match, in Centurion, by an innings before tea on the third day.
Herath was central to the Lankans’ success in Durban, where he took 9/128 without appearing to turn the ball off the straight.
Were he to have tried that sort of thing in a game of social cricket his offerings would have disappeared over midwicket more often than not. But in test cricket too many batters think at least as much as they do. And so bowlers of Herath’s ilk prosper.
They trade in subtlety — a flash faster or a sliver slower through the air, a centimetre or three shorter or fuller, and they’ve snaffled another. They make no sense in cricket cultures like ours, where the emphaticism of booming fast bowling, square drives that fly for six and direct hits on the stumps from everywhere and every angle — and all on Kryptonite pitches — is how we do things.
Not in Sri Lanka, where they have to make a plan. Their greatest batter, Kumar Sangakkara, shimmered with talent and was superbly skilled. But he had to become a silky synthesis of subtlety, in a way that Herschelle Gibbs or Adam Gilchrist never had to contemplate, to make the most of it all. Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka’s greatest bowler, was anything but subtle. But he was a freak of physiology and the greatest bowler in the history of the game, at least at getting people out.
The Sri Lanka team who start a series of two tests at Kingsmead on Wednesday won’t harbour anyone of Sangakkara’s or Muralitharan’s quality, and happily for South Africa Herath has also retired. They won’t even have Dinesh Chandimal, who was unsubtly axed this week and told to go home and work on his game.
Having presided over two heavy defeats in Australia, which followed being beaten 1-0 in New Zealand and thrashed 3-0 by England in Sri Lanka — but apparently before he knew he was being dumped — Chandimal sounded like someone who needed another game of cricket like South Africa needed to face another spell from Herath.
“We are a young team and always learning how to play, especially in these tough conditions,” Chandimal said in Canberra. “We will bounce back in South Africa. I mean, they are three tough tours — we have finished two and now South Africa. South Africa is similar to these conditions and with very good bowlers.
“We know that as a team we have to play in tough conditions and we need to adjust to those conditions and step up as a team.”
Easier said than done, especially as Angelo Mathews is absent injured and experienced off-spinner Dilruwan Perera has also been dropped. Eight of a squad of 17 have played five or fewer tests. Four — batters Oshada Fernando and Angelo Perera, seamer Mohamed Shiraz and left-arm spinner Lasith Embuldeniya — are uncapped.
You wouldn’t want to be Dimuth Karunaratne, who has to captain that little lot. Perhaps he drew the short straw because, in the last of his three innings in South Africa, at the Wanderers in January 2017, he made 50.
The left-handed opener banked a half-century in New Zealand and three against England. The South Africans will remember him scoring 158 not out, 60, 53 and 85 against them in Sri Lanka in July.
So he can play, and perhaps help South Africa learn from opponents who are rarely able to rely on talent and skill to get things done.
Like they did to earn their only test win in South Africa at the selfsame Kingsmead, when they were laughing. Not at us but with us. There’s a lesson in that already.
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