Sri Lanka spin to famous Test win

In the end – which threatened to come at a clip before slowing to a desperate rear-guard crawl – Australia's inaugural defence of its hard won No.1 Test team status was undone by some extraordinary individual efforts from either end of cricket's chronological scope.

On the final day, it was 38-year-old Rangana Herath – the only current Test cricketer to have played the game in the 20th Century – who was the architect of his radically revamped team's stirring 106-run win against the odds at Pallekele.

He finished with 5-54 from 33.3 overs of unerring left-arm spin and match figures of 9-103 as Australia, despite an unprecedented preparation that saw them in arrive in Colombo more than a fortnight before the opening Test, crashed to their seventh consecutive Test defeat on Asian soil from as many attempts.

With their most recent win in subcontinental conditions coming at Galle – where the second Test of this Qantas Tour of Sri Lanka begins next Thursday – on their previous tour to Sri Lanka in 2011.

It's a statistic that is likely to prompt some soul searching before, during and after the team makes its 55-minute flight to the coastal fort city in a military chopper tomorrow morning.

Herath, who made his Test debut against Steve Waugh's Australian team at Galle in 1999, a month before Adam Gilchrist began his 96-Test journey, ripped apart Australia's top-order with three priceless wickets before lunch.

But the fact the tourists found themselves in the position of needing to score 268 runs to win the first match of this three-Test series after they had flattened Sri Lanka for less than half that tally on day one was because of the remarkable achievements by a couple of lads with little or – in the case of 'mystery' spinner Lakshan Sandakan – no international experience.

The most memorable of those was 21-year-old Kusal Mendis's revelatory 176 in his team's second innings, given further context by the fact he finished as the only player other than the world's No.1 Test batsman Steve Smith to reach 50 across the match.

And Smith's studied, at times painstaking, 55 in two hours as he tried to will his team to a distant finish line came at the rate of 44 runs per 100 balls faced, with a solitary boundary.

The only previous Test innings where the habitually free scoring Smith has been similarly circumspect was his 25 off 90 balls faced against the West Indies on a similarly lifeless pitch in Dominica last year.

By contrast, and in a manner that many who watched his innings in its entirety are still trying to decipher given the quality of the bowlers lined up against him, the diminutive Mendis rattled along at a strike-rate of almost 70.

By far the highest of any batsman playing a substantive innings in this Test that was eventually decided on the stroke of 3pm as further banks of cloud glided slowly into place ahead of the inevitable evening rain.

Though it would have concluded a day or two sooner if Pallekele's regular rain and permanent overhead accompaniment had not robbed it of more than 130 overs worth of playing time.

The other name to be forever associated with this quite gripping Test will be livewire left-arm wrist spinner Sandakan who grabbed four wickets in his maiden Test bowling innings and a couple of just-as-vital scalps in the second.

Sandakan and Herath operated in tandem virtually throughout the day, with only brief bouts of alternative coming from barely-used seamer Nuwan Pradeep and occasional spinners Dilruwan Perera and Dhananjaya de Silva.

But the tourists knew they faced trial by spin well before the fifth day began, the start delayed for an hour by the heavy overnight rain that slowly slowed to the drizzle and eventually gave way to bursts of sunshine as the morning moved on.

Any hopes that some ambient heat might take the menace out of the already bone dry, rock hard pitch were soon dashed as Australia's best hopes of finding the additional 185 runs needed – Smith and his best performed batsman over the past year, Adam Voges – was neatly nipped in the bud.

Voges, who had won a vital reprieve via the third umpire review system the previous evening, aimed an ambitious slog-sweep at a full-pitched Herath delivery that spun past the edge of his flashing bat.

Chastened by the near miss, Voges knuckled down but was furious with himself two overs later when he advanced to Herath and chipped back what appeared to be a harmless bumped ball but – after the insistence of Sri Lanka's close-in fielders – it was revealed, on review, to be a catch.

Dreams of a middle-order rally against the trend of Australia's batting across this Test briefly surfaced when Smith and Mitchell Marsh put on 43 at almost a run a ball for the fifth wicket, with Marsh looking more at ease than his captain in stroking three imperious boundaries through the covers.

But when his forward press against Herath failed to cover a delivery that went straight on and into his front pad – with another successful review mounted by the home team – the game tumbled quickly from Australia's grasp.

A result that seemed so unlikely after the Australian bowlers dominated the first day that it clearly dissuaded more than a few hundred local fans turning up at the 35,000 capacity stadium on a Saturday afternoon as their team closed in on victory.

Just their second against Australia in 27 Tests stretching back to 1983.

In a decisive 15-minute period before lunch, Herath claimed the key wicket of Smith lbw in the over after Australia's captain had been ruled caught behind off Sandakan, only to win a stay of execution when his immediate and insistent review showed clear daylight between bat and ball.

Remarkable in itself, given the lack of clear daylight at most other stages of this Test match.

Four balls later, Mitchell Starc lobbed a limp catch back to Sandakan which saw the home team buoyantly head to lunch needing only three more wickets while Australia's far less palatable prospect was 127 runs.

When Nathan Lyon became Sandakan's third wicket of the innings 17 minutes after the break and Australia's final review returned to the dressing room with him, the last rites were there to be delivered.

An act delayed for almost two hours when hobbled spinner Steve O'Keefe emerged from the dressing room and dragged his torn right hamstring to the middle where he battled resolutely with Peter Nevill (9 from 115 balls faced) in a ninth-wicket partnership that yielded just .. runs.

Mainly because O'Keefe's injury, which has cost him a place in the remainder of the series, meant he could barely run at all.

There was fleeting flashes of intrigue amid the stone-walling that saw Sri Lanka bowl an almost incomprehensible 25 and a half consecutive overs without conceding a run as Nevill and O'Keefe dug in for the least productive partnership (comprising 100 balls or more) in Test history.

The appeal for a catch off de Silva when O'Keefe squeezed it to silly-mid-on that was deemed not out, and the absence of reviews meant Sri Lanka were deprived the chance to have the decision overturned when replays showed a clear inside edge.

Then the return of reinstatement of all teams' reviews when the second new ball was taken two overs later, which enabled O'Keefe to overturn an lbw decision off Herath to which he had snuck another fortuitous inside edge.

But when O'Keefe was finally and fittingly bowled by Herath to a spontaneous huddle of joy among the Sri Lankan team that has been rebuilt in the wake of a handful of retiring stars and ridiculed after a winless recent campaign against England, another chapter in Australia's book of subcontinental failures was administered its full point.

With less than a week to unearth a winning formula that has now eluded them at every turn over half a decade.