For the third game in a row they had a meltdown, and this time it happened in the most magnificent manner
Andrew Fidel Fernando31-Jul-20244:05
Takeaways – Suryakumar the captain as funky as the batter
At some point, you just have to break into a slow clap and marvel at the sheer enormity of it. The towering heft. The enterprise. The audacity to have gone so big, and yet find it within to go bigger.The Sri Lanka men’s team specialises in crash-and-burn batting, especially against India. This series they had already blessed us with nine wickets going down for 30 runs in the first match, then in the next game, losing seven for 31. They’ve become an Instagram handle that does only one type of content.”You following these guys?””Yeah bro, that’s my favourite collapse account.”Related
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Even by these standards, though, the nosedive in the third T20I against India was a chef’s kiss, weapons-grade, squirt-it-directly-into-your-eyeballs spectacular.Sri Lanka were at one point 110 for 1, chasing 138 for victory. They needed 28 runs off 28 balls and had two set batters in the game. Then they lost seven wickets for 22 runs to tie the game in regular play, and in the Super Over, lost both their wickets for only two runs.It is sometimes jokingly said that when teams fumble at the finish, that they have “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” which itself is a reversal of the original, and complimentary “snatched victory from the jaws of defeat”.Over the last few years, Sri Lanka’s men’s team has pushed the envelope on batting uselessness so relentlessly, that their performances frequently require never-before-aired descriptions.This was like forming an entire marine expedition crew to search out the shark out of whose jaws they needed to snatch the defeat from, studying maps, poring over weather forecasts, buying all the best equipment, then on the way out of the harbour, crashing into a rock and sinking the ship, such was the incompetence heaped upon incompetence heaped upon incompetence.In the 19th over, India bowled Rinku Singh, an “offspinner” who had never bowled an over in the 22 T20Is he had previously played. Before his over, Sri Lanka needed only nine runs, with six wickets in hand. But to this middle order, Rinku is Shane Warne plus Muttiah Muralitharan plus Anil Kumble plus Jim Laker plus Darth Vader.Rinku, from the one-over sample we have observed in T20Is, bowls darts almost exclusively. To confound expectations, he mixes these up with long hops. He is operating on an extremely spin-friendly track, but there is no subtlety to this bowling – he has not ascended to a plane in which he is drifting the ball just so, reading batters’ next moves, beating them with carefully orchestrated flight, putting enough overspin on the ball to make it dip, dancing it deliciously off the surface.You don’t have to bother with any of that crap when Sri Lanka are in the mood. He gets two wickets and concedes just three runs.A dejected Kusal Perera walks back after Sri Lanka posted just two in the Super Over•Associated PressSuryakumar Yadav watches one of his most talent-bereft spinners bowl a potentially game-changing over, and thinks to himself: “Wow, even I could do that”. So he bowls himself in the 20th and gets two wickets for himself.Sri Lanka are an ice-cream truck with a busted freezer. They are giving the goods away for free right now. In the Super Over, Suryakumar bowls Washington Sundar rather than himself, because, unlike the Sri Lanka batters, he still wishes to be perceived as a human being in some control of mental faculties. Washington gets two Sri Lanka batters caught in the deep off consecutive balls and concedes only two runs. You have to imagine there was some jealousy within the Indian team toward Washington at that point.Suryakumar still gave himself the final act of the game, though. He strode out and faced the first delivery of the Super Over, India needing just three to win. He got a delivery on the pads and swept it hard directly to short fine leg, who should have stopped it, but it burst through his hands and skipped onto the boundary instead.Sri Lanka’s men have now lost 10 matches – across formats – to India in a row. In the dugout, Sanath Jayasuriya watched all this. In his prime, Jayasuriya was such a consistent destroyer that an entire generation of Indian children grew up hearing the rumour that Jayasuriya hid springs inside his bat.Now, he is interim coach, which perhaps is another way of saying he is acting chief of dressing-room bollockings. You can almost imagine him rousing up a furious speech on what it means to represent your nation, and yet also imagine the attempted bollocking becomes a paper-ball cricket game in which another huge batting collapse occurs, such is the aura of incompetence around this team right now.
