England v Sri Lanka: first Test, day three report

"You wonder what will happen after a couple of months off," Cook said. "I got bogged down a bit but I was pleased with the patience I showed to get through.

"It’s an opportunity for Trotty and I to get big ones. There are still 200 overs left in this game, which is a hell of a lot of cricket to be played."

Trott did not begin his England career until he was older than Cook is now (26), so he has little hope of that slice of immortality: this century was his sixth. But Trott further cemented his second place in the all-time Test batting averages behind Sir Donald Bradman, lifting his 61 to 66 by the close.

At the outset, however, their partnership was hum-drum because the pitch demanded patience: it was fancy-dress day but not one for fancy batting. While Chennai powered along at ten runs per over in the final of the Indian Premier League, Cook and Trott brought up England’s 50 at exactly two an over.

But too many England teams of the past would have gone out, played big shots, and landed themselves in trouble. Neither Cook nor Trott was too proud or complacent, even after their heroics in Australia, to go back to the basics of blocking or leaving the accurate balls and dispatching the inaccurate ones.

Ajantha Mendis imposed most of the early restrictions, until the batsmen worked him out. His one wicket - Sri Lanka’s only wicket in the 70 overs that followed morning rain - was that of James Anderson who, although he has been declared unfit to bowl for the rest of this game, was able to visit the crease: ‘bat’ might be too strong a term, but he had done his duty as nightwatchman yet again by surviving overnight, the 16th time out of 16.

Anderson was caught by the finest slip-fielder Asia has produced. Well might Graeme Swann envy Mendis for having Mahela Jayawardene at slip, for among the nuts and bolts that England need to tighten before the Lord’s Test is their slip-fielding to spin.

Anderson is still unproven as England’s slip for Swann, and Andrew Strauss even more so: he got a wrist, not a hand, on the edge that Prasanna Jayawardena sent his way off Swann’s quicker ball.

Strauss had tasted the job in the Mohali Test of five years ago, dropped one off Monty Panesar and abandoned it. Such a specialist position is slip to a spinner - and such is England’s dearth - that Jayawardene should be invited to give a master-class at the Loughborough academy after this tour.

England’s acceleration was impressively smooth. Cook was first to put his foot down, after Mendis’s first six overs had cost three runs. As in Australia, he never contemplated the outside lane, or even fourth gear, just content to move from second to third and tootle along the whole day.

Human weakness surfaced momentarily. Two successive balls however from the slow left-armer Rangana Herath served to illustrate Cook’s great strength as well. First he missed an ambitious sweep, then he missed out on a full toss, driving straight to a fielder.

But thereafter it was like winter returning to the Northwest Passage. There was no way through Cook’s defence; and the dispatching of inaccurate balls was resumed.

Trott was no less patient and no less unflustered. Ordinary mortals would have become upset at such a slow start: after 30 balls the Master of Melbourne, and Baronet of Brisbane, had reached five. In one over from Mendis he had missed out on three short balls to the extent of scoring only a single.

It is Graham Gooch, England’s batting coach, who preaches from the ancient text saying only the next ball matters, and he could not have asked for two more ardent devotees than England’s second-wicket pair.

Trott cover-drove his 31st ball for four, and was away, beaver-busy, as insatiable for runs as Cook - no mean appetite - and almost caught his partner up.

Sri Lanka rang the changes but had no extreme pace to call on, and no extreme spin in the absence of Muttiah Muralitharan, and no extreme foxiness in the absence of Chaminda Vaas. After tea Herath resorted to bowling over the wicket outside the righthander’s legs: unspoken condemnation of the pitch’s lifelessness.

As everything is measured nowadays, perhaps pitches should also be. If more than two edges fail to carry off pace bowling to the wicketkeeper - as here - let a ground be banned from staging international cricket for a year: that would activate administrators intent on five-day blandness.

Test cricket is bringing its own extinction closer by being staged on such pitches. Or stage it at night, without floodlights.

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England v Sri Lanka: first Test, day one report

Ashes holders or not, English cricket can ill-afford to treat its patrons so shabbily. A large section of this ground has been closed off because the lack of ticket sales for this Test could not justify its opening, due to the extra stewarding costs that would incur.

You’d think therefore, that ensuring a fulsome experience for those that do turn up, would be a given, but while that was certainly the case here for the Ashes Test two years ago, it wasn’t yesterday.

Not that England gave the 7,000 spectators present much to be grateful for either after Sri Lanka ended the day 133-2, after winning the toss and electing to bat. With the covers in place until just before the start, they probably expected a seaming pitch and England’s Ashes winning bowlers to run rampant on it.

If the first transpired, to a degree, the devastating bowling did not, as evidenced by the 93-run opening partnership between Dilshan and Tharanga Paranavitana.

England’s pace bowlers failure to fire with the new ball was partly due to the blustery conditions, which make it devilishly difficult to find a rhythm, and partly because they have not bowled much in first-class cricket since the end of the Sydney Test last January.

This season James Anderson and Stuart Broad, who shared the new ball yesterday, have bowled 71 and 59 overs this season respectively, enough to get rid of any rust but not to find a good sheen.

As a result, they gave the impression that they were suffering from the tension from expectation that sometimes overcomes bowlers after their captain has won the toss and put a side in. Broad, especially, was off beam, and everyone who has seen him bowl for Nottinghamshire this season reckon he was undercooked for this Test.

How much his recent injuries contributed to that impression is not clear, but the vigour of youth is quickly replaced by something more circumspect once the knocks mount up.

Anderson did not leak as many runs in his opening salvo, he was equally guilty in allowing the left-handed Paranavitana leave more than he had to play.

Dilshan doesn’t leave many alone, however wide of off-stump they are. Judging from the unfettered way he reached fifty, his attacking philosophy has not been dulled by captaincy or the early season pitches in England.

Over the years the impression in some circles, false as it happens, has grown that he is little more than a dasher. But yesterday he passed 4,000 Test runs, becoming only the ninth Sri Lankan batsmen to reach the milestone.

Aggressive instincts can work against you though and no sooner had he acknowledged his fifty, than was bowled by Graeme Swann after bottom-edging a cut shot that would have been less risky had it limited its ambition to two runs rather than four.

The breakthrough achieved after Swann having give Andrew Strauss some belated control, England got the prized wicket of Kumar Sangakkara, though it needed some sharp eyes by the Rod Tucker, the TV umpire, after Aleem Dar had initially turned down Anderson’s appeal for an edge.

From every replay angle it looked as if Dar’s judgment had been right until Hotspot registered the merest dot of heat as the ball brushed against a few microns of bat.

Although Snicko, not yet used a as tool for such decisions, later confirmed it, Sangakkara has a big sponsor’s label on his bat that overlaps the edges. It wouldn’t be too far fetched, given the faintness of the contact, that he might have enjoyed a different outcome had it not been there.

His fall brought Mahela Jayawardene to join Paranavitana, now applying himself with resolve of an old hand on the sluggish pitch.

But Jayawardene, Sri Lanka’s finest batsman of all time, did not look as assured as the tall left-hander, who passed 1000 Test runs en route to a watchful fifty made off 145 balls.

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India v Pakistan: Cricket World Cup 2011 match report

The Great Game between these feuding neighbours failed to materialise after India won a faltering match to take their place on Saturday against Sri Lanka in the World Cup final, their first for 23 years. They were deserved winners, mostly because a team who squander five chances, as Pakistan did when India batted first, do not deserve to win anything let alone the semi-final of cricket’s biggest tournament.

“We’ve had our struggles in this tournament, but we said it was important to peak at the right time,” said MS Dhoni, India’s captain after his team had won by 29 runs. “Everyone in this side has been tested and I think we’re ready for the final.”

Pakistan have lost all five of their World Cup meetings with India and those misses were instrumental in losing this one, after they allowed India to post 260, a target that was always going to be a tough chase under pressure.

Batting under lights has its challenges too, especially when squadrons of flying insects began to swarm over the ground. In a game that sought to guard itself against most man-made perils this was one the thousands of police and soldiers could do little about and Pakistan went quietly amid a blizzard of beating wings.

The charitable view of their performance is that it was nerves on the day, though when you hand Sachin Tendulkar, one of the best one-day batsmen five innings to make his 85 (he was dropped four times), there is a masochistic streak that deserves the opprobrium of its supporters, who in time-honoured fashion will no doubt torch a few effigies over the next day or so. If they do, and there is certainly a precedent from the 1996 World Cup when Wasim Akram had his house stoned as well, Wahab Riaz and Pakistan’s two off-spinners, Saeed Ajmal and Mohammad Hafeez, ought to be exempt after sharing eight of the nine wickets to fall between them. Afterwards, Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan captain, congratulated his opponents. “I’d like to congratulate the Indian team and the Indian nation, they played better than us and deserved their win,” Afridi said. “But I’d like to thank the Pakistan people as well. We tried our level best and I hope thy enjoyed it.”

Although one of the less intimidating crowds in India, given Mohali’s 28,000 capacity and a preponderance of VVIPs, or what Roy Keane used to call the prawn sandwich brigade, apprehension was apparent, even in a veteran like Tendulkar. What else could have explained his scrappy innings after Virender Sehwag had given India a blistering start with a lightning knock that gave the crowd an early reason to show its voice?

This is probably Tendulkar’s last chance to win the World Cup so perhaps that, as well as having his hundredth international hundred hanging over him, added to the pressure of an already tense occasion. Yet, whatever it is that disrupts the little master’s flow, it afflicted him yesterday and he should have been out on 27, 45, 71 and 80.

Before those let-offs, he had also survived an lbw and a stumping, both of them adjudicated by TV replay, by a hair’s breadth. The lbw, off Saeed Ajmal was given out by umpire Ian Gould and looked just until Tendulkar asked for a review and the replays showed it to be just missing leg-stump. But great players will take any generosity given them and make you pay and the cost of Pakistan’s squandering was painfully apparent when the next highest score on India’s card was Sehwag’s 38.

Sehwag’s assault, which consigned Umar Gul to the status of net bowler after he struck him for five fours in an over, showed the need to attack new ball, which came onto the bat. He looked unable to be contained until Riaz got one to squat a bit off the pitch to have him lbw, the first of five wickets in an impressive performance.

India were 99 for one after 15 overs, but when Pakistan chased under lights, they were 29 runs short of that after the same period, which meant they had to increase the rate just as spin and reverse-swing began to make timing and placement more difficult. As the rate rose, none came to grips with it, though Umar Akmal at least raged against it briefly with a brisk 29 that included two sixes.

Misbah-ul-Haq, who was last man out for 56, played the long game after some of the earlier batsman had tossed their wickets away, but he ran out of viable partners to be a serious threat. Hafeez, who had bowled so well earlier, perished playing the kind of scoop shot usually seen in frothy T20 matches but not on an occasion of this gravitas. Asad Shafiq, too, undid his good work, a modicum of pressure being all that was needed for him to attempt a risky cut shot against Yuvraj Singh and lose his off-stump.

The success of Pakistan’s two spinners brought India’s decision to drop one of theirs for the pace of Ashish Nehra into question, but Nehra, castigated after India’s defeat to South Africa in the group stage, was superb with his skiddy left-arm swingers. Munaf Patel, also bowled well, leaving Yuvraj, bowled by a full toss for a golden duck when he batted, as the only weak link with the ball. But his left-arm spin held up well enough for him to take two for 57 from his 10 overs.

The lack of spark to the match did not prevent it being a TV phenomenon and reports from around the world spoke of drastic cab shortages in Toronto, Oslo and Hackney. Advertising rates during the match were said to be running at $25,000 per 10 seconds of air time, though with an audience reckoned to be one fifth of the world’s population, it was no doubt money well spent.

It appeared to pass without major incident too, with nothing more explosive than Amritsari chicken. The prime ministers of both countries, India’s Manmohan Singh and Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan, attended and shook hands with both sides after the national anthems. Plenty of Bollywood stars also came, cricketers being about the only thing above them in the pecking order.

There will be even more at the final on Saturday in Mumbai, where two teams that bat deep and have variety to their bowling attacks, will contest a fascinating final.

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