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The Sri Lanka captain has been lauded for letting his batsmen play their shots, but after the Colombo defeat he was critical of their lack of patience

Andrew Fidel Fernando at the P Sara Oval27-Aug-2019Rash strokes and poor decision-making cost Sri Lanka the P Sara Test. So says captain Dimuth Karunaratne.It is a difficult summary to argue against, given the nature of Sri Lanka’s demise on the fifth day in Colombo. Lahiru Thirimanne essentially ran himself out, attempting a single to midwicket off the fifth ball of the innings. Kusal Perera was caught in the slips slashing at a short delivery. Kusal Mendis and Angelo Mathews were both out playing defensive shots, but later, Dhananjaya de Silva was caught at second slip after advancing down the pitch.The first innings had been disappointing as well. Sri Lanka were all out for 244, before New Zealand replied with a declaration at 431 for 6.”It was a pretty good wicket in the first innings, and we didn’t execute our shots very well,” Karunaratne said. “The batsmen probably thought it was going to be a good, flat wicket and so the application wasn’t there. Even me, after getting 60 [65], I played a rash shot [in the first innings]. It was a good wicket and you have to put up a good score on it. The Kiwis batted really well. They put up huge totals and put us under pressure.”Tim Southee removes Dimuth Karunaratne•Associated Press

Freedom has been a buzzword in Karunaratne’s captaincy so far – his insistence that batsmen should be allowed to play their strokes is understood to be a key factor in the Test team’s recent success. Following this Test, though, Karunaratne was critical of his team-mates’ aggression.”When I say players should be free, I don’t mean that you just hit every ball that you see. It’s about keeping your mind free. If you at any time feel like you should play the reverse-sweep but you stop yourself, your’re restricting yourself. There are times when you can get runs from that shot, and when it’s a safe option. It’s about being relaxed. Freedom doesn’t mean swinging at every ball. It’s about playing with confidence. At times I felt our players really lacked patience. A Test is a very valuable thing, and batsmen should know how to play according to the situation. They should know how to handle that freedom.”It was on day four that New Zealand swung the match definitively in their direction, and on day four that Sri Lanka’s bowlers struggled the most, allowing the opposition to score 186 for the loss of just one wicket in 48 overs.”We got the wickets of the first three batsmen quickly, and I think we thought the other wickets would also come easily,” Karunaratne said. “But they batted really well, and the pitch also dried out a bit, and the moisture that was there disappeared. It stopped seaming around. Despite that, I think we could have bowled better, and bowled tighter.”But on the second day New Zealand bowled really well, drying up the runs by bowling on one side of the pitch. Apart from Suranga Lakmal and Dilruwan Perera our bowlers don’t have much experience, but I think they’ve played enough first-class cricket to stack one side of the field and bowl to that.”

Keemo Paul was dropped twice at crucial stages of West Indies’ chase, and Mashrafe believed the hosts could have pulled things back had the catches been held

Mohammad Isam12-Dec-2018Bangladesh came away from their four-wicket loss to West Indies in the second ODI ruing two dropped catches at crucial stages of the game, which Mashrafe Mortaza felt affected the confidence of the bowlers.Keemo Paul was the batsman to benefit from both chances, in the 44th and 48th overs, and the fielder on both occasions was substitute Nazmul Islam. In the first instance, Paul was on 6 when Nazmul rushed in to catch a mis-timed slog sweep but couldn’t hold on to it. Then, with West Indies needing 23 off 13 balls, Nazmul overran Paul’s full-blooded pull but managed to stop a boundary. Paul’s unbeaten 18 was a perfect foil for Shai Hope during their 71-run unbroken seventh-wicket that helped the visitors level the ODI series.”We definitely suffered due to the dropped catches especially when we dropped Paul twice,” the Bangladesh captain said. “If Kemar Roach had come to the crease, it would have been slightly more difficult for them to rotate the strike. [Rubel] did get hit for a six first ball but he came back in the last four balls. He created two chances, and if that catch was taken off his bowling, the last ball would have been a dot. These small moments give confidence to bowlers.”We had two fielders [Liton Das and Imrul Kayes] outside today. We had Ariful [Haque], our best fielder, when Imrul left the field. [Nazmul Islam] Apu is the quicker of the two. He was having trouble seeing the ball on that side, although you can’t give excuses at this level.”Nazmul wasn’t the only one to put down chances on Tuesday. Imrul Kayes dropped a sitter at short fine leg before Shimron Hetmyer had opened his account. While it didn’t really hurt Bangladesh at that stage, as Hetmyer fell a couple of overs later, it brought to attention their fielding mixed-bag during this ODI series.While Tamim Iqbal took one of the best catches of the year in the first ODI, Ariful Haque, Rubel Hossain and Mushfiqur Rahim dropped catches. Darren Bravo was given reprieves on 13 and 18, after Ariful dropped a sitter at point while Mushfiqur was stretched by a chance that wicketkeepers usually want to take. Rubel dropped Rovman Powell’s skier off Shakib and although it didn’t affect the fielding side in terms of runs, the lapses brought unwanted focus on an area that has seen improvements in recent months.”You have seen the type of training we do. We do fielding drills every day, even on days when we don’t bat or bowl,” Mashrafe said. “But it is about confidence in the field. When you are uneasy dropping a catch, you tend to drop an easy one. It is totally about one’s mentality.”We missed a number of catches in these two matches, but we still want to move from this game with the positive things.”In the second ODI, Bangladesh were also slowed down by wickets right when they were looking to accelerate. Tamim and Mushfiqur fell in the space of a few overs after they had added 111 runs for the second wicket, and scored fifties. Mahmudullah fell in the 41st over, at the start of his favoured time in an innings. Shakib also fell three overs before the end.”We should have scored 15-20 runs more. We may have reached nearly 300 had Tamim and Mushfiqur batted longer. If the Shakib-Riyad partnership would have extended by 6-7 overs, we may have at least reached 270-280, which would have definitely helped the bowlers,” said Mashrafe.

KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant made centuries for India – and for a while they threatened to bring down a target of 464 – but it was not to be as England’s depth once again gave them a win

The Report by Alagappan Muthu11-Sep-2018England got everything they wanted on the final day at the Oval – victory by 118 runs, a last stirring send-off for the retiring Alastair Cook, and a record-breaking 564th Test wicket for James Anderson. But they were made to wait. And fret.The day lasted far longer than they might have liked, and there was a scary rhythm to it. Eerie quiet followed by a CRACK. The sound of mouths hitting the floor. Another CRACK. The beating of hearts against chests. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. India came to the ground as the team that needed to survive 90 overs. But by tea, they were taking a proper stab at a target of 464. Nothing in the vicinity had ever been chased in the history of Test cricket.The equation read 166 off 33 overs, and there were two centurions at the crease. KL Rahul got there abandoning most of his caution. It had served him poorly in England, leading him to average 16 until the start of this Test. Attacking the ball, on the other hand, brought him 149 runs. Rishabh Pant might have come to the same conclusion after recording a 29-ball duck in Southampton. He reached his maiden Test hundred off only 117 deliveries, with a six over deep midwicket. India started to believe.Madness doesn’t begin to cover what they did in the 44.3 overs they were together, just as madness doesn’t begin to cover the ball that broke that 204-run partnership. Adil Rashid – for long the forgotten asset – ran in from around the wicket at the right-handed Rahul, and pitched the ball in the rough some three feet away from the line of the stumps. The batsman cleared his front leg and prepared to flick the ball away, except it spun. It spun viciously, ridiculously, and unbelievably to tip the bail down from the off stump.England were effectively a bowler short – Stuart Broad was on the field with strapping on his right side, a souvenir from taking Jasprit Bumrah bouncer on the ribs – and it almost seemed like they were content to wait for the second new ball to make a play. Their two most prolific wicket-takers bowled only nine of the first 49 overs. The others resorted to bouncers – a strange tactic on a slow pitch. There were even times when Rahul batted without a slip.India had no pressure to deal with as they ransacked 131 runs at 4.37 per over in the middle session. But there was just too much time on the clock. And too many runs to go after. It all ended – in rather slapstick fashion – with No. 10 farming the strike from No. 11, and two balls later getting his middle stump knocked back. Anderson roared in triumph – he had just deposed Glenn McGrath as the most prolific fast bowler in Test cricket – and ran into the arms of his team-mates. They asked him to lead them off the field, but he insisted that Cook should get that honour, and then choked up during an interview when asked if he would miss his mate.There was – realistically – only one winner possible after Cook and Joe Root had struck fairytale hundreds. But it was fun as Rahul and Pant made everyone think about what if. They got together at 121 for 5 with more than two sessions left to play. But both men took the match situation and smuggled it out of sight. Nobody who watched their partnership would have realised that they were playing for the team that was behind in the match, and the series.Rahul launched fast bowlers over the top. The lack of pace in the pitch assisted him in fixing a problem against the inswinger, as did his adjusting his front foot stride, taking it down the pitch instead of across, and slowing down his bat-speed, at least while defending. But whenever there was width, he did not hold back. There was a six off Ben Stokes that was downright majestic, standing tall on the back foot and cutting the ball to smithereens.Pant looked special when he flayed spin along the ground, and weird when he hit in the air. He just puts so much into the swing that he literally falls over, meaning even his lofted drives over cover end up looking like skewed sweep shots. A much more proper rendition of it, over midwicket, crowned him the first Indian wicketkeeper to hit a century in England. These two were India’s top-scorers in the 2018 IPL. A few months on, they put on India’s highest partnership in a Test series in England.But the lower order could do only so much to mask a scorecard that once read 2 for 3. India’s biggest problem in this series – especially when it was alive – was a lack of runs from their top order. Rahul’s century comes as hope for the future, but it won’t quite wash over the fact that this team has once again fallen short away from home.

England slipped to 49 for 5 in their chase of 206, but their lower order led by Wyatt helped them recover

The Report by Shashank Kishore28-Feb-2019In a tale of two lower-order fightbacks, England prevailed by two wickets to pocket their first championship points on their tour of India. For the hosts, this was another trophy in the bag, allowing them to build on their ODI success in New Zealand.On a comeback after missing the World T20 late last year, Katherine Brunt’s incisions resulted in India losing 6 for 21 at one stage, slipping from a comfortable 129 for 1. Brunt took four of those wickets in the course of a four-over second spell, having already dismissed the opener Jemimah Rodrigues with the new ball.Of her wickets, Smriti Mandhana’s may have been a touch lucky, the India vice-captain pulling a long-hop straight to deep midwicket for 66, the highest score of India’s innings. Punam Raut, also on a comeback, made 56 before Brunt bowled her with an in-ducker.Punam Raut plays a glance•PTI

Mona Meshram bagged her second duck of the series when she played all around a full delivery, while Mithali Raj got a thick inside edge onto the pad, only to be caught smartly by Sarah Taylor. The more India appeared to try and strengthen their middle order, the more they unravelled.It took a stodgy 47-run stand between Shikha Pandey and Deepti Sharma to lift them to 205 for 8. Brunt finished with 5 for 28.On each of their two previous outings, England struggled on the red-soil Wankhede surfaces. In the final ODI too, there was the familiar early collapse, this time against the seam of Jhulan Goswami, who sent back the top three as England slipped to 49 for 5.There was still plenty of spin to negotiate for England; where there was fizz and turn from Ekta Bisht previously, they had Rajeshwari Gayakwad’s slow flight and loop to contend with this time. But while Gayakwad was economical, conceding just 41 off her full quota, Heather Knight and Danielle Wyatt negated her threat and provided England a calming influence.Wyatt walked in at No. 7 and immediately made run accumulation look easy, leaving her imprint on the tour after sitting out the first two ODIs. Picked only because of an injury to Sophie Ecclestone, Wyatt milked runs steadily to make an 82-ball 56, along the way adding 69 with her captain Knight.The game was still India’s to lose when Knight fell, but they let the pressure slip. Georgia Elwiss and Wyatt added a further 56 to bring the target within touching distance. When Wyatt dragged a slower ball from Pandey to long-on with England needing 32, the game was back in the balance. One run later, India could have had their eighth wicket when Elwiss got a leading edge to Pandey’s slower delivery, only for the bowler to fluff a straightforward offering on her follow-through.Elwiss went on to see the chase home and remained unbeaten on 33. Brunt, who would have liked to cool off after an intense spell, made 18 crucial runs to take England to within two runs of victory. Anya Shrubsole then walloped a boundary to complete the formalities.