Sri Lanka square series with big win

Having turned around their ailing Test match fortunes at the expense of the world’s then-top ranked team, Sri Lanka has now ended a six-match winless streak by inflicting a hefty defeat on the number one ODI outfit.

In front of another jubilant crowd that is riding a wave of resurgence along with a team that faced a grim home season after their barren tour to England, Sri Lanka’s ongoing mastery of their home conditions enabled them to level the five-match ODI series at 1-1.

After they famously swept the Test matches 3-0, a defeat that exposed Australia’s frailties against top-class spin bowling on pitches tailor-made for that very weapon.

But unlike the ODI series opener at Premadasa last Sunday, the pitch for today’s fixture was sporting enough for Sri Lanka to post 288 despite a spectacular late-innings collapse, though still sufficiently alien to the Australians for them to struggle before being bowled out for 206.

And lose by 82 runs, their biggest ODI loss since New Zealand smashed them 159 runs as a precursor to their Chappell-Hadlee Series defeat at Auckland earlier this year.

There were some notable individual moments in Australia’s bowling innings, none more meritorious than James Faulkner’s hat-trick that spanned two overs and went virtually unnoticed by the near full-house at Premadasa.

Matthew Wade further pushed his claim as a specialist batter in Asian conditions, regardless of whether he keeps wicket or not, with an innings-high 76 batting at number five.

And Adam Zampa’s 10-over return of 3-43 did nothing to quell the growing view that he is essential to Australia’s white-ball aspirations – and maybe, if he continues to develop in the domestic first-class system, those with the red ball – in the sorts of spinning conditions they can now expect to confront them at every turn.

But in the end, as it has been for so much of this troubling tour, the inadequacies of Australia’s batting against spin bowling on a pitch where the opposition made their highest ODI score at home for more than a year were as glaring as they were during the Test series whitewash.

And that was after the initial damage was done by seamers, rarely seen at the bowling crease during Sri Lanka’s rampaging dominance of late.

Indeed, the dismissal of David Warner from opening bowler Thisara Perera’s first ball of the match provided a stark illustration of where the respective teams are currently at.

Warner came into this tour after a month-long lay-off due to a broken finger and claiming he played his best cricket when he was rested and fresh.

Yet his appearances at the crease have been so fleeting in both formats that the Sri Lankans – most visibly the successful bowler and their equally runs-shy opener Tillakaratne Dilshan – openly mocked the Australian vice-captain as he returned to the dressing room, head down for much of the walk, with a single to his name.

His opening partner Aaron Finch made good his promise from game one to go hard at the bowling from the outset, and brought about his own downfall when he dragged Perera back in to his stumps.

From that point, it was time to run the spin cycle.

Which saw Steve Smith once more fall to the left-arm variety (Amila Aponso in his second ODI) as did George Bailey and then Zampa and Faulkner, while Moises Henriques found himself at sea against all genres and eventually lost his wicket to legspinner Seekkuge Prasanna.

Who had managed a solitary wicket in his four ODIs in England earlier this year, but had to wait just four deliveries in his first crack at Henriques, whose four innings in Sri Lanka (Test and ODIs) have yielded scores of 4, 4, 6 and 4.

His dismissal in the 28th over, which left the world’s number one ODI team lurching at 5-118 and still 170 runs adrift, prompted Australia’s most successful spin bowler to take to social media.

Just who those untried ‘specialists’ might be was not immediately forthcoming from the champion leg-spinner, but he’s unlikely to be the last to share his thoughts as Australia record in the internationals against Sri Lanka slumped to 1-4.

Not that the day had started that way.

The sight of Smith coming off second-best at the coin toss might not have made a news story, but the fact that Mitchell Starc failed to take a wicket in his opening over was contrastingly unforeseen.

In fact, Starc was forced to wait until his 12th ball of the match – a full three overs into Sri Lanka’s batting innings – before he made his customary disassembly of an opener’s stumps, this time Danushka Gunathilaka in his first outing of the Australians’ tour.

Smith’s decision to employ Nathan Lyon as Starc’s new-ball partner, as was the case in the final Test at a different Colombo stadium but on a curiously similar batting surface, paid dividends a ball later when Dilshan was bowled off his pad although it took the veteran many seconds to grasp what had befallen him.

But the Australia captain’s next instinctive gamble, to employ part-time off-spinner Travis Head as a replacement Lyon in the 10th over – while the power-play field restrictions were still applicable – was not nearly so triumphant.

Sensing his chance to dominate his fellow international novice, 21-year-old Kusal Mendis launched himself at the Australian who had hoped to emulate the bowling deeds of the Sri Lanka all-rounders, as 20 runs flowed from his opening over.

When Head tossed the ball up, Mendis danced fearlessly down the track and lofted with impunity into the vacant land behind the bowler.

And when the South Australian compensated by firing the ball flatter and faster into the lifeless surface, Mendis rocked back and launched him into the yawning gap at deep mid-wicket.

Mendis’s assault not only changed the equilibrium of a match that was beginning to closely resemble the series opener that Australia won by three wickets, but it provided an invaluable shot in the arm for the remainder of their innings.

With his experienced vice-captain Dinesh Chandimal again providing wise counsel as well as his own batting consistency at the opposite end, Mendis was the dominant force in a 125-run partnership that remained intact for 21 overs.

Not that the Australians didn’t have their chances to end it.

Mendis should have been run out for 40 when he drove to mid-off only for Smith to knock down the ball as Chandimal set off for a single.

For a moment, both batsmen met mid-pitch as Smith collected the ball and threw off balance at the stumps where a direct hit would have been so conclusive it would have been given out by the umpire on the field.

But Australian fielders hitting the stumps have been about as common as single-figure humidity during the past month or more in Sri Lanka, and the pair lifted the total from a precarious 2-12 to a solid launching point of 3-137.

That was when Chandimal fell a couple of runs short of a record streak of 50-plus scores in ODIs for a Sri Lankan batsman (which remains at five), and Mendis perished a couple of overs later.

Both of them trapped in front of the stumps by Zampa, who gave a very convincing impression of a front line spinner with his control, his variations and the pace that he bowled which meant the Sri Lankans – no mean players of spin – were often unable to get after him.

The value of a wrist spinner on these dry, lifeless surfaces became further apparent Zampa lured Dhananjaya de Silva into a false drive that was smartly snared at extra cover by Smith.

But then became the game’s focus for the wrong reason when he camped under a skied top-edge that flew from Kusal Perera and turfed a catch that might well settled atop his broad-brimmed canvas hat had he not raised his hands such as the accuracy that the Sri Lankan had pinpointed him with his mishit.

It was the sort of missed chance that is tough to reconcile even when it doesn’t materially influence the course of a game.

When the beneficiary goes on to almost double their score – Perera was 29 at the spill and a blistering 54 from one fewer deliveries faced when he became the starting point of Faulkner’s hat-trick – it remains as a taking point long after the game’s done.

And probably would have been if Faulkner’s hat-trick – the sixth by an Australian bowler in ODIs and the first since Clint McKay’s against England at Cardiff in 2013 – had not only provided a headline but a handbrake.

Kusal Perera’s dismissal from the final ball of Faulkner’s eight over was followed by Mathews holing out from the first ball of his ninth, and then Thisara Perera next ball when he had his bails clipped.

Faulkner’s muted celebration that accompanied the rare milestone told much about the state of the match, which might have been even more dire if Sri Lanka had not self-destructed at the very end of their innings.

As Faulkner and Starc – who finished his spell in the same predictable manner in which he began the day – uprooted the home team’s last five wickets for 27 runs in the space of three overs.

But having put together their highest successful ODI run chase on Sri Lankan soil three days earlier when they reeled in 227, the Australians faced a far heftier task to prevent the series being levelled.