Dhananjaya de Silva (25), the debutant, was the only batsman who played with assuredness before he fell to a top-spinner from Lyon that bounced extra to induce the inside edge and for Joe Burns to pouch the catch at forward short leg.
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“The second is that a certain training session for the Australia players at Pallekele had been carried out without permission”, Sumathipala told ESPNCricinfo.
With so many frontline Test bowlers now unavailable due to injury, Sri Lanka’s selectors have been forced to look to the next tier of players for replacements.
On the day that Australia were presented with the mace as the world number one side, Smith took the unusual move of naming his starting XI a day before the start of the first Test in Pallekele, near Kandy. Sri Lanka will boast two players – Mathews (59 Tests) and veteran spinner Rangana Herath (70) – who have notched the most Tests of any player from either side, with Nathan Lyon (54) and David Warner (51) the most capped of the tourists.
“In the tour match he bowled beautifully”.
While Smith would generally bat first if he won the toss, a “tacky” Pallekele stadium wicket on Monday has him contemplating unleashing pace ace Mitchell Starc as soon as play begins if the deck remains in the same state come the toss of the coin.
“We don’t know too much about these guys, we haven’t played them a lot, especially our bowlers, so we’ve worked out a few little things here and there in that innings, and we’ll look to keep on top of them with those plans throughout the whole series”. Caretaker bowling coach Allan Donald says the left-armer is the best quick in the world (he has an ICC ranking of 14 right now after recovering from injury). Am I the traitor or are they the traitors?
Cape Town – Former Sri Lanka spinner and current Australia backroom staff member, Muttiah Muralitharan, has fired back after he was accused of influencing the preparation of the pitch at the P Sara Oval, in Australia’s warm-up match. However, there was no play possible in the final session and that remained the score at stumps. He needs five wickets to become the only Australian finger spinner in nearly 140 years of Test cricket to reach 200 Test wickets.
Muralitharan said he got involved with Australia because he loved cricket and that Sri Lanka’s cricket board had sought help from him only once since his worldwide retirement in 2011. Along with a friend I’ve opened the Foundation of Goodness, where every year we help 50,000 families. There’ll be times when they want to attack and you might get more scoring options and times when they want to be a bit more defensive. SL will be looking to take the advantage of playing on the home soil and create history by beating Australia in this 3 match series.
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“You have got to be prepared to get your runs in one and twos”.
