Sri Lanka Batting Coach Expresses Reservation Over Four-Day Test

Oct 5, 2017 at 1:51 PM

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Sri Lanka Batting Coach Expresses Reservation Over Four-Day Test

After South Africa stars Faf du Plessis and Dean Elgar made their reservations clear against four-day Tests, former Sri Lanka captain and current batting coach Hashan Tillakaratne also feels deviating from the traditional five-day games is not the need of the hour.

Several cricket boards in recent times have pressed for four-day Test matches with Cricket South Africa (CSA) being the most vocal one in recent times. CSA has been pushing for a day-night four-day Test against Zimbabwe on Boxing Day, creating a widespread debate. But so far, the concept of trimming the traditional format has not received a promising response with Tillakaratne being the latest to express his reservation.

“Five days of proper Test match cricket tests your skills. We should stick to five-day Test matches. What we saw in Abu Dhabi earlier this week was proper Test match cricket where the result came only on the final session of the last day. I am not a fan of deviating from five-day Test cricket,” Tillakaratne told journalists after his team’s training at the ICC Cricket Academy on Wednesday (October 4).

At the same time, Tillakaratne threw his support behind day-night Test cricket and said the Islanders are ready to play their first day-night Test, scheduled to be played on Friday (October 6) against Pakistan.

“It is something new for us, but we are eagerly looking forward for the challenge,” added Tillakaratne who led Sri Lanka from 2003 to 2004.

“We are well prepared for the pink ball challenge. Our training today was with the pink ball and tomorrow we will train with the pink ball under lights,” Tillakaratne further said.

Speaking on the much-debated topic of the pink balls’ behaviour, the Sri Lankan batting coach said:

“The pink ball I believe behaves differently according to conditions. When we trained in Colombo under lights it moved a little bit. Here we have to wait and see. I saw some footage of last year’s West Indies versus Pakistan game here and the ball didn’t move about much and it was as good batting track.”

Tillakaratne also expressed his delight over Sri Lanka’s performance in the first Test where they beat Pakistan by 21 runs to end their nine-match losing streak across all formats.

“We had a good batting plan and all batsmen went about things according to that plan. There is no guarantee that when you go out to bat that you can get a hundred or a fifty. The partnerships we built were very pleasing and it was nice to see Chandimal getting a big score, Dimuth nearly got a hundred and Dickwella and Dilruwan Perera chipping in,” he said.

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