Aussies chasing 413 after 21-wicket day

On paper, the world's top-ranked Test team's assignment of 388 with three full days up their sleeves to win the second Test against Sri Lanka and level this three-match series at a victory apiece would appear not beyond possibility.

On the dry, dusty pitches of Asia that are as incomprehensible to Steve Smith's team as the circles and squiggles that populate the surrounding street and shop signs in Sinhalese and Tamil, it is a probability that falls somewhere between impossible and laughable.

Quick Single: Sizzling Starc claims historic haul

And that was before they imploded again in the final half hour to enter day three 3-25 and on the brink of their heaviest Test defeat since last time they folded to spin in Asia – against Pakistan in the UAE in 2014.

Hopes that Australia might find a way back into a series that began to slip from them at Kandy last week faded faster than the late afternoon light (with its accompanying thunderstorm) when Smith's men surrendered without a whimper to be bowled out for 106 before lunch this morning.

And then disappeared like a puddle in the steamy tropical heat when Sri Lanka's middle and lower-order batters treated spin pair Nathan Lyon (2-80 from 19 overs) and Jon Holland (1-69 from 10) with disdain bordering on contempt.

Indeed, if Australia had found bowlers capable of lending some visible means of support to Mitchell Starc, whose 6-50 today gave him match figures of 11-94 – the best by an fast bowler in a Test at Galle and the best by an Australian quick in Asia for more than 35 years – it could be a dramatically less lopsided Test.

And Test series, between the world game's heavyweight and a Sri Lankan team written off by even many of its own supporters before it began due to their unfancied line-up and their recent poor form.

But on a day when an extraordinary 21 wickets fell for 314 runs, and 11 of those were Australians in the clueless first and last hours of the day, it now seems only a matter of tidying up the final margin when day three begins tomorrow.

The last of those 11 Australian wickets – Usman Khawaja bowled for the second time inside three sessions (and first ball without offering a shot on the second of those) – left Australia once again teetering on the brink of calamity by stumps on the second day.

And with no hint of indication that any of their remaining batsmen have an idea how to push the game into a fourth.

As relentlessly as Australia's seam bowlers have plugged away in conditions they have good reason to boycott over occupational health and safety concerns, they have received minimal help from their spinners over the course of four innings.

But both bowling cartels have been undermined by their under-performing batters who – as a collective – have one more innings in this Test and then next week's final match in Colombo to prove they are able to cope with subcontinent-style conditions.

Quick Single: Herath skittles Aussies with a hat-trick

Which will have significant ramifications for the home summer that looms, given the selection panel will be looking to settle a team for the four-Test series in India in February and March next year.

Where Australia has not won a Test match in 10 attempts since their only successful campaign there in 2004.

On the evidence tendered in 74 minutes of shambolic mayhem on the second morning of this match – rivalled only in the recent past by the even less productive first innings on that infamous morning at Trent Bridge a year ago – not many are likely to make the cut.

Unless something changes drastically over the final three days, through which occasional thunderstorms are forecast to blow, only Smith (on the merits of his first Test half-century) and all-rounder Mitchell Marsh have shown they're up to it.

And even Smith will face some searching questions, with no inquisitor more intense than himself, after surrendering his wicket twice in three innings to shots that he might never want to witness again.

Today's provided a thumbnail sketch of his team's abject failings with the bat, in both context and execution.

Quick Single: A galling mauling for Australia's batsmen

As was the case at Kandy a week earlier, Smith had led his team's batting into the second morning fully aware that a first innings lead was paramount and that Sri Lanka's spinners would be more than difficult to negotiate for any new batsman arriving at the crease.

With the dry, dusty wicket offering increasing turn, varying pace and the occasional deliveries that leapt from a length or held up on the pitch, the Australians were as likely to encounter a fast bowler as they would be a Nottingham-style green seamer.

But the ball after Khawaja fell for the very ploy the Australians talked about avoiding in the wake of their Kandy defeat – not laying bat on deliveries that go straight on towards the stumps – Smith pulled out a stroke even more culpable.

Against Rangana Herath, the bowler that each of his batters had failed to decipher during his nine-wicket bag in the series opener, Smith saw a ball delivered from wide on the crease, shorter in length and marginally quicker than those the left-armer had served up in the six previous balls he'd delivered already that morning.

One with 'danger' writ large, even if his team were cruising at 3-300 rather than the far less palatable reality of 3-59 and still more than 200 runs adrift.

But rather than safety first, Smith's instinct to score sent him on to the back foot, with an angled blade looking to send the ball scooting through the inviting gap in the field behind point.

Only to find – quelle surprise – that it did indeed slide on with the bowler's left-arm, skid through with minimal bounce and smash into the stumps that Smith had left unguarded.

Almost as if he was unaware.

The prophecy of the 'one that slides on' fulfilled, it became time for the 'don't lose wickets in clumps' warning to be roundly ignored.

In less time than it took to surrender an innings to England at Trent Bridge, Australia fell from 3-59 to 106 all out.

Their lowest Test innings tally against Sri Lanka, their worst in the subcontinent since that previous low (120 at Kandy in 2004) and 175 runs fewer than the inexperienced but clearly undaunted Sri Lankans scored on a not dissimilar surface a day earlier.

Few, if any of those who succumbed could blame the pitch in all good conscience.

Adam Voges, who has already seen his Bradman-esque average of 100 drop to a Mike Hussey-esque 82 in the space of three Test innings with a potential three more to come, might argue that the ball he scooped low to extra cover had propped in the pitch.

Although the quality of Dimuth Karunaratne's diving catch might cancel out any such mitigation.

The two lbws that followed – in consecutive balls to give Herath Sri Lanka's second Test hat-trick after seamer Nuwan Zoyza's historic first against Zimbabwe in 1999 – were textbook examples of what the Australians had vowed to avoid after their bitter experience at Pallekele.

Peter Nevill briefly thought about reviewing his, possibly because of the lean run of form he's experiencing with the bat, but was given the bad news by his batting partner Mitchell Marsh that he best make a dignified exit.

Nevill's return of 220 runs from his past 12 Tests (at an average of 18.33) has led some to question his immediate future, but he remains the most clinical gloveman in Australia and one of his mentors – former Australia vice-captain Ian Healy – was averaging just 17.5 with the bat at the same stage of his lengthy and decorated Test career.

At 6-80, the world's best Test team had still not negotiated the follow-on mark set by the game's seventh-ranked side and may have been tempted to declare then and there in a bold ploy to ensure Sri Lanka was compelled to bat last on the wearing deck.

But the way the home team then batted through the final session – after their top-order again folded in the face of Starc's new-ball blitz – it would scarcely have made a difference if they were asked to bat third, fourth or in the dead of night.

Even Voges' clumsy dropped catch at slip from Sri Lanka's danger kid Kusal Mendis when he had scored just five didn't look likely to cost heavily when he edged to Nevill in Starc's next over.

However, another of the recurrent problems to have plagued the ICC mace holders on this trip – inability of their spinners to make inroads with the old ball – ensured that only a calamitous rain event can spare Australia a thumping series loss.

From a stumbling 5-98 when vice-captain Dinesh Chandimal became Starc's eighth wicket of the match, Sri Lanka's bottom-half batters slog swept, reverse swept and windswept a by-now dispirited and tetchy Australian attack all over the picturesque Galle ground to the cheers of a large and buoyant local crowd.

The final indignity being the 61-run eighth-wicket stand between spinners Herath and Dilruwan Perera, more than all but one union between any Australian batting pair in this series to date.

And definitive proof that it is not the pitch but rather the wildly disparate capacities of teams to master it that has decided this Test.