The legbreaks dance. The topspinners fizz. There's chatter around the batter. A slip is in. The run rate is fine, and there are wickets to burn. But you're still not sure the chasing team will win.
Hello. You're in it now. This is a classic of the ODI genre . Keep your eyes on this thing. We've got a low-scoring-dogfight here.
Squint and watch the puffs of dust that come off the surface, listen to the pleading lbw appeals, and then hear them turn into a drawn-out chorus. See top players of spin bowling grope for the ball, get both edges beaten, while others fight every impulse in their body to play the slog or the sweep as if decades of batting evolution haven't occurred. Find yourself transported to the late nineties and early aughts, to a time before ball tracking or real-time snicko, a time when LED stumps were a mere glint in some nerd's eye.
This game is a hip hop beat with a big bassline, a piano melody, and a snare drum. It's got old-school energy from the jump. Like when Pathum Nissanka hits five fours in the first ten overs, then pumps the brakes when the field spreads.
In most modern matches, you've got no business taking 67 balls to score fifty as an opener. A 56 off 75 balls (a proper throwback strike rate of 74.66) is more likely to be described as weird innings than a solid one.
An anchor? Ugh. What is that? Take it out and drop it deep in the ocean where it belongs.
The standard operating procedure now is to reverse pressure, never let bowlers dictate the play, and if you're really going to slip into accumulation mode, come down the track and launch one down the ground once in a while, or slap a reverse-sweep past short third, or scoop a seam bowler over your shoulder once just to shake things up a bit.
But 2024 DMed, and this game left it on read. Look down that Sri Lanka card. Read those strike rates out loud and tell me you don't feel like you've just stepped out of a time machine. There are scores like 14 from 31 from Kusal Mendis, 14 from 21 from Charith Asalanka, and 20 off 26 from Janith Liyanage, a No. 6 batter. These are "tortured" and "laboured" innings by today's standards. They may have merely been "cautious" in what already feel like the dinosaur times.
And glance down through those bowling figures. Only 20 overs of seam bowling, and 30 delivered by spinners, including one over of wonderfully optimistic but mediocre offspin from Shubman Gill. This is as God/the Gods/Mother Cricket/The Universe intended for matches in South Asia between two South Asian teams. Helpfully, this series is unattended by genre-bending freaks such as Jasprit Bumrah, who may have finessed his way to many wickets, and ruined the chance of this match running so close.
Even India's opening combination summoned up the turn-of-century spirit in their partnership. Gill ambled his way to 13 off 25 in the first ten overs like the good old-fashioned straight man to the balls-to-the-wall Sanath Jayasuriya-Virender Sehwag-Adam Gilchrist type, which Rohit Sharma played so beautifully on a tough pitch.
Rohit ran down the pitch and smoked Asitha Fernando over midwicket second ball, crashed debutant Mohamed Shiraz for four, four, six in his second over of international cricket, then even when the spinners came on, and were turning it loads, kept hitting out. In a time when powerplays were merely known as "fielding restrictions" these were the gun players. The batters who sent the scoreline screaming out of the starting blocks while the ball - there was only one - was still hard. Who saw opportunity, where others saw danger.
That the chase twisted, and that Sri Lanka called on 37.5 overs of spin, most of it pretty high quality, but some of it Charith Asalanka , was perfect too. This is not really a jibe at Asalanka, who as a spinner of limited skill operated on a big-spinning surface as he should - largely bowling wicket-to-wicket, and changing up his pace. But in most modern ODIs, he's not finishing with 3 for 30.
You could never fool yourself completely that this was a game happening way back then, of course. Khettarama was way less than half-full for a big international on a Friday. If this had been a T20, you suspect there would be a full house. Of the formats dying in cricket, ODIs feel like they are the dyingest - they don't have the moral value or the old money of Test cricket, and they don't have that sweet, sweet eyeballs to advertising to broadcast-revenue capitalist magic that T20s have right now.
That this series is even ODIs, rather than the whole tour being six T20s, seems like it might have something to do with the next Champions Trophy being an ODI tournament, which India have obviously qualified for, but Sri Lanka have not. How long till that becomes a T20 affair, though?
Perhaps we are in the final stage of bilateral ODIs, which to be honest, feels fine. But though it jarred with the tenor of most modern limited-overs matches, this game at Khettarama was glorious in its own way. Sri Lanka competed like the Sri Lanka of old, throwing tenacious spin at a tough opposition, finding ways to hoist themselves back in the game. India employed more contemporary methods, but the pitch dictated so much it kept pulling them back to the yesteryears as well.
The final act was perfect. Sri Lanka's fourth best spinner Asalanka, darting a ball into India's 11th best batter Arshdeep Singh, who produced a hoick across the line that harked back to a time when batting coaches barely had time for bowlers, and as a result the tailenders would produce shots that would be described in terms that brought loincloth-wearing farmers to mind - words such as "agricultural".
It's not anybody's idea of perfect. Still, there's fun in occasionally replaying a classic.
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