< 1 minute read It’s not a great film title, but we’d watch. We will watch, in fact. Kumar Sangakkara had two years as captain, but, like Mahela Jayawardene before him, jacked the job in because of the pressure. Unfortunately, Tillakaratne Dilshan’s minced thumb has meant Sri Lanka need a stand-in and after much
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Benevolent Uncle Sanath is back
< 1 minute read At the age of 41. Sam emailed to say: “I might write something about how he’s really old and he’s like everyone’s uncle and he’s, like, properly old.” We asked what he might conceivably add to that sentence. Sam concluded that there was nothing to add.
Continue readingTillakaratne Dilshan pans a hundred and is arsed about it
< 1 minute read Tillakaratne Dilshan celebrated enthusiastically when he reached his hundred. Some will say it was because he’d got his name on the honours board at Lord’s, but we doubt that. Dilshan is the Sri Lanka captain and his team had embarrassed themselves in Cardiff and then done little to repair their
Continue readingSri Lanka slightly taken aback by England attack
< 1 minute read Imagine you’re Sri Lanka. You’re four days into the world’s most uneventful bike ride. You’re in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain on a beautiful flat road and you can clearly see that there is nothing threatening for 50 miles in any direction. You’re tootling along at about 8mph feeling
Continue readingPlaying Sri Lanka will be hard work
< 1 minute read A good first day of Test cricket for England, in the sense that it put them straight. Playing Sri Lanka demands perseverance. It demands perseverance so earnest it comes with a pipe and a scowl. If Sri Lanka’s feisty wins in their warm-up matches hadn’t got the message through to
Continue readingSri Lanka are sneaky
2 minute read If you’ve only been half paying attention to Sri Lanka’s two warm-up matches, you might have got the wrong impression. In the first, against Middlesex, the first day ended with them having conceded 321-5. Andrew Strauss scored a hundred, but so did Dan Housego. “They can’t bowl,” said Robert Baby-Bunting
Continue readingThe Roof at Lancashire
< 1 minute read We didn’t cover Lancashire’s Roses victory over Yorkshire at the weekend because – you know – sometimes you just can’t be bothered. That win took Lancashire to the top of the table and one of the big contributors has been The Roof, Farveez Maharoof, who is rapidly turning into a
Continue readingLasith Malinga’s knee injury
< 1 minute read Lasith Malinga’s knee injury is just about bad enough that he can’t play Tests and just about good enough that he can play one-day internationals and the IPL. Sri Lanka feel that this financially lucrative degree of pain could be sorted with some rehabilitative work back home and has therefore
Continue readingTendulkar v Murali
< 1 minute read We wrote about the various World Cup storylines during the quarter-finals. The stories of Tendulkar and Murali, two ageing greats, seem to be the strongest now, but that’s mostly due to hindsight. All the same, it makes for a good narrative. There’s also a minor subplot that no-one will care
Continue readingSri Lanka owe us a fiver
< 1 minute read Sri Lanka were definitely going to win for most of their run-chase, then they went all cagey and it got interesting and we had to give the match our full attention, then they won anyway. The point is, we had work to do and we couldn’t do it because Sri
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