The past couple of years have shown me some strange and some beautiful cricket grounds. Dharamsala, where the iced crags of the Himalayas loom behind the stadium like hired muscle. The Basin Reserve, built inside a massive traffic roundabout in Wellington. Southampton’s Rose Bowl, where half the grandstand is a Hilton hotel. Concrete slabs in Samoan villages on Savai’i, where the bat is a triangular club and the ball made from strands of twisted rubber. The Pallekele ground outside Kandy surrounded by wave-form hills, mist and showers winding between, a gentle environment to regard whenever the environment itself has stopped play.
Of all these, the most striking might be the most recent. From Kandy you wind down west from the hills, narrow roads choked with buses and people and trishaws, then you kiss the outskirts of Colombo before bending south and hitting the large modern freeway that speeds you to Galle. This is Tony Greig’s freeway – apparently in 2011 the man with the hat was given presidential dispensation to use the as-yet unopened road, while everyone else took the winding coast route.
The thought of Greig driving a vehicle reflexively brings one line to mind: “I don’t hold a grudge, Bill. For me, a grudge is nothing more than a place to pork your cor.” Echoes from the past. But then that whole tour looks spectral now, the era gone: a president named Rajapaksa, Greig on television, Peter Roebuck on radio, the series on ABC, Michael Hussey batting, Australia winning in Asia, Nathan Lyon having hair.
Down the end of Greigy’s motorway lies Galle. The day we arrive we’re running late for the Australian coach’s press conference, worrying as the GPS shows we still have to cross the city. That takes about seven minutes. Turns out it’s not a big place. It sprawls along the beachfront, sand and waves and lean-to shacks for shelter. Built over the memory of the 2004 tsunami, the whole town hums with fragility.
The ground is right in the middle. A couple of low stands, the rest made up of grass banks. These are jammed full by the last session each day, the locals singing in clumps, the visitors doing their best to survive numerous cans of 9% beer. If you’re broke or passing by you can still watch play through the chainlink fence. Or there’s another option, the thing that makes the ground special.
From the stand, down to the south-west corner, you can see the ocean, heavy surf bashing onto the shore across the road. To the left, the bulk of Galle Fort begins. Its current stone iteration was started by the Dutch when they overran the Portuguese in 1640, and the massive walls indicate how little they wanted to give it back.
This mottled mass of granite and coral, metres deep and metres high, faces the entire south side of the ground. Behind and over it, the famous clock tower bristles with scaffolding, as though attended by an arachnid geometrist. Flags starched sideways by the stiff sea breeze. All along the ramparts, the space for soldiers and cannons is now covered in grass, and consequently in people, lying back, eating, reading, flying Sri Lankan kites. On match days, mostly watching the cricket, from the perfect vantage point.
The wall didn’t get much action in the Test just gone – barely lunch on day three before Australia were boxed up and packed away. After such a loss people love blanket statements, issued with all the certainty of hindsight.
The 1999 Test matched the one just completed, in that Sri Lanka lost a wicket first ball before recovering to 296. The Australians did a better job, making 228, but rain killed the contest. Rangana Herath – the destroyer of 2016 – made his debut. In 2011, Australia made competent scores of 273 and 210, which became match-winning given Lyon and Shane Watson took down Sri Lanka’s first innings for 105.
The 2004 Test was a classic comeback, down by 161 on the first innings, before hundreds from Damien Martyn, Matthew Hayden and current coach Darren Lehmann secured a 352 lead. The visiting spinners prevented the chase, Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill taking nine in the innings. Across the match, Muttiah Muralitharan took six cheaply, then five expensively, Warne took five expensively then five for a bargain. In a beautiful display of spinner synchrony, Murali had Warne stumped for a duck and MacGill out first ball, then in his two innings was caught second ball off Warne and stumped first ball against MacGill.
Those results sat in the context, before this series, of 13 Tests played in Sri Lanka over the course of 33 years for one defeat – and that in the nine-man match in 1999 after Steve Waugh and Jason Gillespie were taken to hospital. It’s easy to say that Australia can’t play in these conditions. Except they can, and recently enough they did. If ever this series looked a foregone conclusion, it was in the opposite direction, given Sri Lanka’s recent frailty and Australia’s record. Then along comes this team, one spooked by demolitions against India and Pakistan, and whose cancelled tour of Bangladesh last October increasingly looks like a dodged bullet. In less than six days’ worth of cricket, what had been inevitable was firmly … evited?
As far as the batting goes, there is little more to be said. As in Dubai, as in Sharjah, as in Kandy, a succession of batsmen were spooked by balls that spun and were out to balls that didn’t. The defining image of this series will be Usman Khawaja, bat raised in a leave, watching the ball into his stumps like a kid watching a lost balloon ascend to the troposphere.
Steve Smith was so bereft of positives that a few dicey Adam Voges reverse sweeps straight to point and a couple of Mitchell Marsh clouts over the infield were deemed by the captain to be signs of evolution, courage and intent. Perhaps from the change room; from the commentary box they looked like throes of desperation, lost Alaskan hikers thrashing their waterproof jackets at a distant Cessna.
Bowling is generally more difficult to assess. No scorecard reflects the mass of variables behind each performance. It’s not so hard to find the difference though, when Australia’s specialist spinners took six wickets and Sri Lanka’s took 18. The hosts took theirs at 13.2 runs a pop, the guests at 48.5. If you’re a left-arm orthodox specialist, it’s probably not a good sign when you’re dragged for a part-timer delivering the same variety. That’s the indignity Jon Holland suffered, replaced by Adam Voges at one stage in his second innings.
It was part of Holland’s general suffering in his first Test. With the bat, he was twice nought not out. With the ball he fluked one wicket per innings, the first lbw from a missed full toss, the second from a reverse sweep edged into the stumps. The words “classic dismissal” were not heard on commentary.
Including part-timers, Australian Test debutants have bowled in 141 innings. In his second, Holland was thrashed for the third-worst economy rate among them, going at 6.9 an over. One man ahead of him is of course Bryce McGain, attacked so ruthlessly by South Africa to the tune of 8.27 an over. The other is Voges, who bowled two overs on debut for 15 runs. Holland’s other innings ranked 16th, at 4.26 an over, just ahead of the second innings of Steve O’Keefe’s debut.
Mind you, Holland is part of a trend of Australian spinners having a torrid welcome that often doubles as their farewell. McGain’s tale. Xavier Doherty’s 0-107. Beau Casson’s 0-43 and 3-86. O’Keefe with 2-107 and 2-112 in the Emirates. Brad Hogg’s 1-69 in Delhi. Ashton Agar, 0-24 and 2-82. Cameron White, 0-39 and 1-49. Michael Beer, 1-112.
MacGill’s 2-112 in the first innings against South Africa, then 3-22 against pinch-hitters chasing declaration runs. Warne’s famous 1-150. Nathan Hauritz, barely used and flattered by 3-16 against the tail in Mumbai, but returning 2-87 in the second innings even as the wicket fell apart and Michael Clarke entered the frame with 6-9. Even Jason Krejza, with his 12-wicket debut match in India, was tapped for 358 runs in getting them.
The exception is Lyon, peculiarly at this same Galle ground, where he took 5-34. That was also the last Test that Australian won in Asia. Lyon’s second debut innings was on trend, 1-73 at 3.68 per over. That’s the trend he carried over into this match.
Only Mitchell Starc in any way grasped how to play at Galle. His first innings figures of 5-44 disprove the aphorism I would like to employ, because here I am writing home about it. But not all figures starting with “five for” reflect a blistering spell. Actually on the first morning Starc dished up two flaky breakfast pastries, but Sri Lanka’s woeful openers have mustered 30 runs in the series across eight single-figure innings. Presented with a Danish, they responded with something rotten. He finished the innings along with the stumps of two tailenders, not the hardest task given his repertoire. Only the middle wicket of Kusal Mendis required a seriously good ball to a seriously good batsman.
But Starc’s efforts in the second innings were a purer display of skill: pace, movement, aggression, outside edges, his trademark splattering of stumps late in the day coming as the icing on a more substantial cake. His 5-44 had become the second-best return by a seamer at Galle, but there were 22 better performances by spinners. Second time his 6-50 leapt to eighth overall. Only a few efforts by Herath, Murali, Ravichandran Ashwin and Yasir Shah lie ahead of him. He’d also returned the second-best figures in an innings by an Australian against Sri Lanka, with 11-94 the best in a match.
Which goes to show that breaking records doesn’t mean much if players work alone. When a game starts sliding away from a team, it can landslide. Plenty of touring sides have endured these in Australia, but even Sri Lanka’s thrashing in Melbourne on their last trip didn’t have a day quite as abject as Australia’s second here: eight wickets before lunch, two sessions of being merrily carted, then back to lose three more wickets in six overs by stumps.
There is one Test left to find some answers, develop different ways to play, show up the fatalism that says all this was doomed to transpire. The Sinhalese Sports Club pitch in Colombo has often been a batting paradise, but local sources say it can be prepared to take spin. No doubt it will. A few early tremors and things could get ugly. At the least, we can hope that the oval is attractive.
