Sri Lanka’s campaign so far against England has just been a misery. The Sri Lankans have been profusely poor with the bat and their batting cards for their first three innings of the series are nothing short of a joke. It was in the fourth innings of the series, where the Sri Lankan batsmen actually stood up and seemed to be prepared to face the English seamers.
Wicketkeeper Dinesh Chandimal scored a fighting century at Durham to save his side from the utter humiliation of an innings defeat. His century was filled with an array of lovely strokes, and the right hander used aggression to a very good effect. Ahead of the third test at Lord’s, Chandimal stated that he was aiming to score another ton in the test series.
“I set myself a challenge when I left Sri Lanka, which was to score two Test hundreds in England,” Chandimal said. “It’s a massive challenge to play here at this time of the year,” he said. “The good thing is that we had adequately trained before the Test match.”
Emphasizing on the conditions, Chandimal said, “The real feel on our first day of training at Chester-le-Street was three degrees Celsius. You can’t simply take that kind of cold. I remember going out to bat at practice and I couldn’t grip the bat. Even after batting for 15 minutes or so, you don’t get the feeling that you are holding a bat. They were tough conditions. I can’t forget the 163 I scored against India at Galle last year, because that was a special knock and contributed to a win, but I take satisfaction from having batted well in these conditions as well.”
Chandimal also elaborated on the specific game plan which the Sri Lankans had developed just to tackle James Anderson. “We spoke a lot on playing James Anderson. The way we were batting tentatively – had we continued, we would have been dismissed anyway. So the game plan was to let Anderson also think rather than get settled down and make things difficult for us. Some adjusted by taking guard on the off-stump, and some came a foot out of the crease to negate his swing,” said Chandimal.