Steve O’Keefe was batting on three at the break with Australia on 146-6 after Rangana Herath (4-35) had wrecked their hopes of a big first innings lead with an impressive display of spin bowling. Have they done one hundredth of what I have contributed to cricket in Sri Lanka?
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“He bowled the same ball and some skidded on and some spun – quite similar to (Sri Lanka spinner) Rangana Herath, the way he bowls in these conditions”.
Hazelwood is, however, hopeful that the embarrassment caused by the batting collapse will play on the home batsmen’s minds for the rest of the series thus making things a lot easier for the Australian bowling attack.
Muralitharan has been criticised for taking a consultancy role with Cricket Australia for the current tour of his homeland and relations appear to have soured in the build-up to the first Test in Pallekele this week.
“The second is that a certain training session for the Australia players at Pallekele had been carried out without permission”.
The Steve Smith-captained Australia are hot favourites to dominate the home side, who head into the clash following a dismal tour of England and with a young and inexperienced line-up.
This will be Steven Smith’s first test series in Asia and Australia hasn’t lost a single test match under his captaincy and he is also the number 1 batsman in test cricket so he is going to do anything possible to win this series.
“They’ve got a pretty inexperienced line-up and we’ll try to get on top of that as much as we can”.
Mitchell Starc picked up the first wicket, Dimuth Karunaratne lbw for 5 to a ball that tailed in, but Starc was playing his first Test since November and took some time to find his consistency.
“We’d like to turn that around”, said Smith, the world’s top-ranked Test batsman.
He took 2-107 and 2-112 on Test debut against Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates in 2014, and 3-63 in the first innings of the rain-marred SCG clash against the West Indies last summer.
Sri Lanka cut their deficit to 80 before rain stopped play with a session to spare, but the showers did not arrive quickly enough for Perera, who was lbw to Starc (1-3) with what turned out to be the last ball of the day.
“And the field settings are a little bit different, along with the fact these guys [the Sri Lankans] will probably sweep a bit more and play shots that we don’t typically see in Australia”, he said.
“While playing against the Aussies we should be courageous and play positively, and if we do that we can beat them”.
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At lunch, the hosts were reeling on 84 for five with debutant all-rounder Dhananjaya de Silva (24) and Kusal Perera (12) unbeaten at the crease.
