Sri Lanka’s uphill task

Sri Lanka has always underperformed in Australia and probably least successful sub-continent team apart from Bangladesh against Australia in Australia. The reason for the downfall has been their inability to bat against pace and bounce. I will not be surprised even if the dream of winning a test match Australia against Australia remains as a dream at the end of this series too given the form that Sri Lanka is in at the moment. The biggest problem that Sri Lanka has is their inconsistent and inexperienced batting line-up. This batting line-up has failed so many times both in limited over matches and test matches in the recent past. I don’t see any sign of situation getting better in the near future either. Entire batting responsibility will fall on Mahela Jayawardena and Kumar Sangakkara in this series too like it has been happening for so many years. To Sri Lanka’s disappointment, both Mahela and Sangakkara are also struggling to find their form these days. Unless those two perform well in this series, Sri Lanka will be in a big trouble in terms of batting. To be frank, there is no point in blaming selectors for this situation because there are not good enough players to play international cricket in domestic cricket either. Selectors have given youngsters enough chances to show their potential but most of them have not lived up to the expectations.

Although Australia lost the test series against South Africa, they are in a good form. They played well first two test matches and they could easily have won the second match. Therefore, Sri Lankans will be facing many problems from the very first ball on of this series. Getting wickets of Michael Clerk, Micheal Hussey, David Warner and Ed Cowen will be a huge challenge for Sri Lanka in this series. Sri Lanka seem to have strengthened their fast-bowling power having included Chanak Welagedara and Nuwan Pradeep for this series although we don’t know to what extent they will trouble Australians.