Pathum Nissanka (Silva), Jamie Smith's briefs and arse evasion | an England v Sri Lanka 3rd Test recap

09/09/2024 15:04

4minute read

Before this third Test, Sri Lanka had already lost the series. They hadn’t had much of a warm-up; hadn’t played first-class cricket on these shores since 2016; and England were increasingly hell-bent on imposing themselves. It had been a tough shift, in short, and they could be forgiven for imploding in this final match. Instead they took another option. The option they took was ‘crushing England without mercy’.

Pathum Nissanka

Surveying the BBC scorecard for this match, you’d think Sri Lanka’s opening batter, Silva, would have earned more plaudits. With 64 off 51 balls in the first innings and an unbeaten 127 off 124 balls in the second, he was a pretty big contributor to the victory.

“Silva” is of course Pathum Nissanka Silva, who as far as we can tell is pretty much always referred to as Pathum Nissanka – a man who is not in fact at all short of a plaudit right now.

Complacency Watch

Amid much talk of England potentially achieving their first home summer Test clean sweep since 2004, England very much did not achieve their first home summer Test clean sweep since 2004.

They got battered, in fact.

From 261-3 in their first innings, they played honestly quite badly. Their proactive batting erred on the side of seppuku, while their bowling was rarely better than ‘unremarkable’ and quite often worse.

Team selection had a whiff of overconfidence too. Dan Lawrence didn’t come across as a Test opener and Josh Hull didn’t (yet) seem like a Test bowler.

Josh Hull: first look in Test cricket

We don't believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players' debuts – but we report on them anyway.

Is Josh Hull 6ft7in? Yes.

Is he a left-armer? Yes.

Are these the kinds of qualities England would desperately love to add to their Test bowling attack? Yes.

Is 20-year-old Josh Hull in a place where said qualities can comfortably be added without consequence? Mmm, possibly not.

You definitely get some useful stuff with Hull, but you also get a good few 82mph half-trackers outside off stump that are very easy to spank to the fence. Not being blessed with the England team’s mandatory sense of positivity, we found it disconcertingly easy to envision future days of horror.

On this limited evidence, we can absolutely see why Hull is a bowler England would want to bring up to Test standard as soon as possible, but the usual Brendon McCullum selection policy of, “oh we’ll just pick him and it’ll probably work out perfectly,” may need a little finessing.

Also he has the stupid, too-long-at-the-back, quasi-mullet that seems to be in fashion and we cannot endorse that.

> England rate Josh Hull – but does he yet rate himself?

Jamie Smith fulfils his brief

We’re struggling to think of an England player who has so perfectly met the very specific expectations placed upon him when he was selected.

When England dropped Ben Foakes (and Jonny Bairstow) and picked Jamie Smith, they said they were looking for someone who could play as a proper batter, hit out a lot more when batting with the tail and basically just have an impressively low profile time with the gloves.

After five Tests, Smith is averaging 50, having kicked this particular series off with a match-shaping hundred after all the batters above him hadn’t done a right lot. Most strikingly of all, he has consisently changed gears in such dementedly ambitious fashion that it really should have resulted in a stalled engine.

In this match he moved from 15 from 31 balls to 67 off 50 and looked whatever the modern equivalent of a million dollars is in doing so. (A trillion dollars? A trillion euros? A quadrillion dirhams?)

Top Fernando Watch

In bare statistical terms, Vishwa Fernando outperformed our current favourite Fernando, Asitha Fernando, in this Test match, by five wickets to three.

We do think Asitha bowled better though. Maybe it was just the bits we watched, but he seemed to beat the batters an awful lot.

The high point was when he bowled an away-swinger around Dan Lawrence’s arse, over the top of middle stump.

Great stuff. Thanks for coming, Sri Lanka. Hopefully it won’t be another eight years before you’re here again.

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