It is a slightly odd assertion, given that it started with them losing their first three wickets for six runs and limping to the first lunch break at 80 for five, but for most of the opening two days of this game Sri Lanka played rather well. They fought back to post an acceptable first-innings score, and their efforts in the field on Thursday were enterprising and regularly rewarded. But on the day that Manchester launched its annual Pride festival, the tourists came close to surrendering theirs.
At least Angelo Mathews regained his own. Having failed to score in his team’s first innings and then punctuated their efforts in the field with a succession of half-hearted ball-chases – at 37 he is perhaps not at his most athletic – in their second, and with his side in dire need, he conjured memories of his great innings at Headingley a decade ago. He finally fell for 65 to a combination of Chris Woakes and a changed and swinging ball, and England will be grateful that similarities with that match did not get any more pronounced: on that occasion Sri Lanka scored 257 in the first innings and England made 365 in reply – an almost identical script to this game – before Mathews struck a brilliant 160 to set up a comeback victory.
Here he sauntered past the mark of 1,000 Test runs against England in just his 12th game against them, with able support from Kamindu Mendis, providing an infusion of the kind of class and quality that for a while Sri Lanka seemed to have misplaced. Combined with news that Dinesh Chandimal had not, as first feared, had his thumb broken by a Mark Wood short ball, and a couple of dropped catches, he helped his side’s outlook track the day’s weather – initially dismal, but brightening across the afternoon.
The first sign of trouble came before play even started, which was the puzzling moment Sri Lanka chose to make the first significant change to their field. Jerusalem played, the players came on, Prabath Jayasuriya got read to bowl the day’s first over, and then everything stopped for a couple of minutes while some pads were brought on to allow Nishan Madushka to take up a position close to the bat. It seemed strange, chaotic, unplanned, all the more so when, once safely protected, Nishan ambled over to backward point. A few overs later the pads were called for once again – in the ultimately unfulfilled hope Sri Lanka were about to get a chance to bowl at Gus Atkinson – and this time Madushka spent the following over at midwicket, and the one after that at gully.
It was as if Sri Lanka had been caught cold by a completely unexpected outbreak of cricket. And if they were certainly cold – players running around the field in awkward waddles, hands thrust deep in their pockets; Madushka rolling up his trousers to put on those pads and revealing a pair of long johns underneath – they could certainly have been expected to finalise and communicate some kind of plan before their first bowler was at the end of what in Jayasuriya’s case can only be described as a walk-up.
It was not the only sign of muddled thinking. Having conceded just one run, Jayasuriya was replaced by Asitha Fernando, who after a single over of his own – featuring, to be fair, two Jamie Smith boundaries – was replaced again by Jayasuriya. Those runs took Smith to 86, and close enough to triple figures for nerves to start rattling, at which point Sri Lanka switched to defensive fields and a genial jog towards a century became a plod. At one stage there were 52 successive balls that went for either one run or none, and nine overs off which England scored just 10. The bowling was disciplined, certainly, but the proactivity and positivity that marked the tourists’ performance in the field on Thursday was absent. England’s overnight lead of 23, with four wickets remaining, had been inflated to 122 by the time the last fell.
Which was when things turned really grizzly. England’s innings ended just before 1pm and would normally have signalled lunch, but in an effort to make up for the overs lost to rain on Thursday, the first session was extended by an additional 15 minutes. By the time anyone ate, Sri Lanka were two down and as in the first innings a key batter – Mathews himself on Wednesday, Madushka here – had left a ball that would have (and in this case did) hit the stumps.
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Mark Wood was held in reserve for a while, and once introduced immediately produced a beast of a delivery that jagged into Dimuth Karunaratne and flew, via edge and thigh, to Harry Brook in the slips. It was the first time the 34-year-old had taken a wicket with his first ball of an innings, but also not exactly unprecedented: in Sri Lanka’s first innings he produced something extraordinarily similar with the first ball of his second over. By then Mathews was at the crease and starting to purr; now the question is which Sri Lanka will turn up on Saturday morning.