The start of the day was marred by the lack of any organisation from the Sri Lankan Sricket Authorities, none of the tour companies seats are reserved and some interlopers snuck into our area today causing some dissatisfaction for some of our party who arrived late ! Obviously over selling the tickets and making the most whilst not assisting the official tour parties, didn"t affect myself but some were put out.
England duly saw off the last two wickets this morning, even though Sri Lanka advanced past three hundred, Anderson taking another five for in a test innings. He know stands alone as the fifth highest wicket taker in English cricket and will surpass Ian Botham at some point in the next two years if he continues to avoid injury. A major achievement for a player that came back from being the young new hope, who was left out of the side and suffered a severe back injury and may have already beaten Botham without those.
Having seen the Sri Lankans post a better total than expected, expectations were high that England would challenge that total and put the home team under some pressure. Unfortunately this didn"t turn out to be the case, Cook plsyed down the wrong line to a ball that didn"t really do that much. Trott had a brain rush and danced down the wicket to be stumped and left lying on the floor in humiliation, up to this point he had looked solid. Strauss who was looking in good form decided to play a pre-meditated sweep to the spinner Herath, not the right ball and even after review was found to be out plum. So Pietersen was to be the saviuour, nope left a gap between bat and pad clean bowled.
So Bell the man who had shown no form recently then showed that runs could be scored, although he did have a blip about fifth ball playing the most awful shot ! But after that he started to use his feet to the spinner and started to look in no trouble as boundary after boundary flowed from his bat.
The only problem was that his partners at the other end kept walking back to the pavilion, as the winter hoodoo of a spinner seemed to come back to haunt the England batsmen, both Prior and Patel were both deceived by the flight of Herath and were caught in front both going back to good length balls, only Broad offered any resistance as he dispatched ball after ball to the boundary, only to fall foul of another attempted sweep, much to the disgust of the supporters around me.
So another spinner in the sub-continent took the majority of the wickets, Herath with six, deceiving the England batsmen and playing mind games with their confidence.
