Usually it’s the visiting team from South Africa, England, Australia and New Zealand to the subcontinent that bemoans conditions and promises to do some soul searching at the end of the series. But Australia have completed their most dominant series victory over Sri Lanka on the island, and the tables have turned, the regular order has been upended, and the boot is on the other foot.
From this wreckage of a series for Sri Lanka has emerged a particularly surprising question: should Sri Lanka stop playing on tracks this spin-friendly at home? Captain Dhananjaya de Silva certainly says it’s worth thinking about.
“There’s definitely a question of whether [we] are playing spin very well as batters,” he said after Sri Lanka lost the second Test in Galle by nine wickets. “We’ll have to rethink that. If you looked at how they played, they scored a lot of runs square [of the wicket], and understood that it’s hard to defend on these pitches. We couldn’t apply that ourselves with the pressure that they put on us. We have to think about whether we keep playing on pitches like this, or on pitches better suited to us.”
Spin has historically been Sri Lanka’s go-to weapon with which to cut down visiting teams, and the surface in Galle is especially notorious for taking rapid turn. Australia, though, have now inflicted the biggest Test loss Sri Lanka had ever suffered followed by a nine-wicket defeat in successive Tests in Galle.
Of the 19 home Tests Sri Lanka have played since 2020, 15 have been played in Galle. Of those 15, Sri Lanka have lost seven and won eight, with England and Pakistan also beating them at this venue. Sri Lanka have long been reluctant to play at Colombo’s P Sara Oval, however, owing to their modest record there.
It is not as if Galle is about to be blacklisted. But Dhananjaya hinted that a greater diet of home Tests elsewhere – the primary venues considered will be Pallekele, and the SSC and P Sara in Colombo – might be a more sustainable team development strategy.
“As a batter, I do like playing in the other venues because my records there are better,” he said. “If you take our batting averages, they’re lower than those of batters in other countries, and you can see why that is – because we bat in spin-friendly conditions.
“It’s hard to have an outstanding record on these pitches. But bowlers have to be very skillful to get wickets on good tracks too. Still, I think it’s worth thinking about.”
Dhananjaya said Sri Lanka’s inability to convert their half-centuries to centuries had contributed substantially to this result. Both Australia and Sri Lanka had six occasions of a batter making fifty or more in the series. But five of Australia’s batters went on to make hundreds – including a double-ton – whereas Sri Lanka’s highest score of the series was 85 not out.
“On these tracks, it’s very hard to score, and we are always talking about how set batsmen need to score, and get to 150 or 200 to get to a good total,” Dhananjaya said. “Not all the six or seven batters who play will get runs, but the players that do make starts have to really capitalise. Australia had about two batters who scored in each innings, but those batters made big ones.”
