‘It’s hard to have an outstanding record on these pitches’ – Dhananjaya de Silva calls for rethink of playing on spin-friendly decks

Dhananjaya de Silva on batting on spin-friendly tracks (Source: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)

The Sri Lankans have suffered a disappointing loss against Australia in the two-match Test series at Galle, losing it 2-0 and ending their WTC cycle on a bad note. The second Test saw the Aussies finishing the game on the fourth day and winning the match by nine wickets.

The Aussies had dominated the match once again and though there were some decent performances from some Sri Lankan players it was not the best of series for them at all. The team has been getting a lot of criticism recently and a question was asked to Sri Lanka skipper Dhananjaya de Silva on whether the team needs to stop playing on spin-friendly tracks at home to which he gave a clear answer saying that they do need to rethink their plans for the same.

“There’s definitely a question of whether [we] are playing spin very well as batters, we’ll have to rethink that. If you looked at how they played, they scored a lot of runs square [of the wicket] and understood that it’s hard to defend on these pitches. We couldn’t apply that ourselves with the pressure that they put on us. We have to think about whether we keep playing on pitches like this, or on pitches better suited to us,” De Silva said as quoted by ESPNcricinfo.

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“As a batter, I do like playing in the other venues because my records there are better, if you take our batting averages, they’re lower than those of batters in other countries, and you can see why that is – because we bat in spin-friendly conditions, it’s hard to have an outstanding record on these pitches. But bowlers have to be very skillful to get wickets on good tracks too. Still, I think it’s worth thinking about,” De Silva added.

Speaking of the series, Dinesh Chandimal and Kusal Mendis were the only consistent batters in the series who scored some valuable runs for Sri Lanka. On the bowling side, even though Prabhat Jayasuriya ended up being the highest wicket-taker he averaged 40.44 in the three innings he bowled.

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