Atrocious fielding and mediocre bowling

Richard Dwight

The penultimate 4th ODI cricket match between India and Sri Lanka played on Tuesday at the R. Premadasa Stadium, resulted in a comprehensive victory for India, which gave them the pleasure of winning the overhaul series (3-1).

The fifth and final ODI that take place at the Pallekele Stadium on Saturday, holds no interest for India being in the comfort zone other than drubbing it even more into the Sri Lankans by winning the 4th as well (4-1).

But for the Sri Lankans, it will give the youngsters further opportunities to expose themselves to this level of cricket - for in this series their inexperience was exposed with Sri Lankan batting first, Dilshan got 42, Tharanga 51, Thirimanne 47 and Chandimal 28 apart from Dilshan, the other youngsters must strive to convert their 50's and 40's to 100's or thereabouts. It was disheartening to find skipper Mahela and Mathews being dismissed cheaply. The tail did wag for Sri Lanka to be 251 after 50 overs. Some would say that the total was sufficiently competitive.

But we would venture to state that even if Sri Lanka got 280 or more, we would still have lost the match.

Through the years we had earned a reputation of being a high class fielding side, but here in this match we succeeded in creating a dent to that reputation.

Our ground fielding left much to be desired with many runs being given. In quest of a run out, when a fielder throws the ball, one should make it a point, not just to hang around, but to get behind the wickets. For many runs were filtered away by overthrows.

To make matters worse we began spilling catches at random and the pity of it all was, when Mahela spilled Suresh Raina the infections had caught on.

We had no pace bowler to bowl line or length, wicket to wicket which the batsmen made merry.

Malinga gave runs and three went for boundaries as byes, the rest of the pace bowlers excepting for Pradeep, were mediocre in being wayward and pitching short.

There were moments when the batsmen were hesitant to be tentative and so why couldn't we have resorted to close in fielders for a while.

It could have been a good thing if Mahela and Dilshan came on occasionally. All is not lost, keep going.