In their 21st year as a Test-playing nation, Sri Lanka's adulthood was finally
recognised with the present they most wanted: a first full tour of England. But
the party hardly got going at all. They were without Muttiah Muralitharan for
the first part of the tour; when he did arrive, they lost the last two Tests com-prehensively.
England played so well that a 2-0 victory did not flatter them,
but Sri Lanka certainly helped gift-wrap it. And the whole thing was con-ducted
in the shadow of a bigger, better jamboree - the football World Cup.
Failure to reach the final of the triangular one-day series compounded an
unhappy tour, which was in total contrast to the giddy, all-conquering stopover
in 1998. When Sri Lanka's coach, Dav Whatmore, said at the end, "I've seen
some positives but we haven't got what it takes to win abroad," only the first
bit was debatable.
Sanath Jayasuriya, a lugubrious figure throughout, set the tone, though he
wasn't the only one sporting a furrowed brow. Sri Lanka's Australian bowling
coach, Daryl Foster, resigned in an argument over travel expenses, Aravinda
de Silva was robbed of £3,000 at a Chesterfield hotel, and the tour manager,
Chandra Schaffter, found out during the Third Test that his contract would
not be renewed.
It was a tour of three distinct parts. Sri Lanka started like a side counting
the days until Murali recovered from a dislocated shoulder, rallied briefly to
dominate the drawn First Test without him, and then, when he was back in
the side, played just as the book says subcontinental sides should in an
English May and June. They didn't win a single first-class match, not even
against British Universities.
England won their first Test series since going to Sri Lanka 15 months
earlier and completed their first double on the ICC Test Championship table.
Never had the present generation of England players dominated a rubber
quite so extensively: this was England's first 2-0 win in a home series since
1978. From the start of the second innings at Lord's, England averaged 65
per wicket, Sri Lanka just 27.
If England had gone "round the brick wall" in that series in Sri Lanka,
as Scyld Berry put it, this time they huffed and puffed until the house fell
down. While Ashley Giles, left out at Lord's on the basis of precedent rather
than pitch, kept a rein on things, the seamers pounded Sri Lanka's
strokemakers into submission with relentless discipline, especially on an
Australian-style pitch at Old Trafford.
Enjoying the luxury of not having to penny-pinch to make the best of
modest scores, Nasser Hussain's captaincy was at its most sparkling. Not
once in the field did he have to defend a total of less than 500, and he
allowed himself treats he couldn't usually afford. His declaration gave the
First Test a kick when most captains would have happily kept their feet up,
and most of his field placings came off too: when Hussain put himself at
leg gully for de Silva at Old Trafford, the ball followed him within an over.
He even started winning the toss.
Sri Lanka arrived in April on the back of nine consecutive Test wins - a
record surpassed only by the two great sides of modern cricket history, the
1980s West Indies and the present-day Australians - yet few people took
that statistic seriously. Eight of the wins had been at home, the other in
Lahore. It was widely believed that outside the subcontinent, and especially
in a dank English spring, the limitations of their angled bats and flashy
strokes would be exposed.
Their early form did nothing to confound that opinion. Most of the batsmen
could hardly buy a run, and when Kent hammered 419 in only 63.3 overs,
the bowlers needed Murali like never before. Sri Lanka were ripe for a
hammering, but someone forgot to tell the MCC groundsman - or the
elements. The first two days of the series were Lord's in May by name,
Colombo in February by nature. A featherbed pitch and sultry heat provided
the fuel for Sri Lanka to pass 500 in the first innings for the eighth time in
ten Tests. England, by contrast, hadn't managed it even once in five years
and 60 Tests - although that wrong would soon be righted.
England responded to the unique challenge of facing three left-arm seamers
with some cack-handed batting. Despite having a long, strong line-up with
Andrew Flintoff at No. 8, they collapsed and followed on as nature took the
course it so often does when a big total is on the board. The man who started
the rot, Ruchira Perera, was all over the papers the next morning - but it
had nothing to do with the fact that he dismissed Michael Vaughan and
Graham Thorpe with successive deliveries. Channel 4 footage cast doubts
on his energetic, slingy action, and many viewers agreed that it looked dodgy.
Perera was ultimately reported by the umpires after the match for a suspect
action and played little further part in the tour, though he did leave Mark
Butcher £1,500 out of pocket, after Butcher told his ghost-writer at the
Croydon Advertiser, "when [Perera] bowls short he just runs up and throws
it at you. I can't believe someone gets away with it."
If Butcher was loose with tongue and wealth, he was frugality personified
with the bat. His 291-ball century in the second innings at Lord's was the
soothing rhetoric that persuaded England that the only demons were in their
mind, not the pitch. With the first of five 500-plus totals in the season,
England exposed as fanciful the notion of Sri Lanka winning a Test without
Murali.
From there the series followed its preordained script. Sri Lanka batted first
again at Edgbaston, but this time there were two key differences: Hussain
put them in, and Andy Caddick, lethargy incarnate at Lord's, got out of the
right side of the bed. Bowled out inside 53 overs, Sri Lanka were never in
the game as England built up their biggest first-innings lead since 1967.
It was Marcus Trescothick's turn to help himself this time, with a career-best
161. Even the return of Murali, who toiled through 64 overs for his
regulation five-for and denied Butcher a second (and ultimately third)
consecutive hundred with a mirror image of Shane Warne's Ball of the
Century, couldn't stem the tide. A serene last-wicket partnership of 91
between Graham Thorpe and Matthew Hoggard, in which Hoggard actually
took more of the strike, was a microcosm of the morale of both sides
throughout the series.
The Third Test wasn't far off a carbon-copy. With James Foster ready to
return following a broken arm, there were suggestions that Alec Stewart's
118th Test would be his last. Not a bit of it. Sometimes with Stewart you
just know a century is in the post: here he was equalling Graham Gooch as
England's most-capped player, and England were playing Denmark in the
second round of the World Cup when he resumed on 57 on the third day. A
patriot and football fan, Stewart waited while most of the crowd watched the
Denmark game on the £10,000 big screen that the ECB erected behind the
Stretford End - even sneaking the odd glance himself - then, as they funnelled
back in, belted four consecutive fours to move from 86 to 102. For a man
whose public face can be wooden, Stewart has an acute sense of theatre.
After Giles took the final two wickets at almost the last possible moment
that could keep a result alive, England were left chasing 50 off six overs.
Yet, for them, this was a penalty shoot-out without the suffocating pressure:
the series was already won. Vaughan and Trescothick found top gear straight
away and romped to a thrilling victory with an over to spare as Jayasuriya
failed to work out that if he spread the field, they could get them in singles.
At 7.35, it was one of the latest finishes to a Test in England.
This was a very bad tour for Jayasuriya, whose one-dimensional strategy -
bat first, score 500, bowl Murali after about ten overs - suffered in comparison
with the invention of Hussain. His batting, lacking any of its usual joie de
vivre, fell apart to the extent that he dropped down the order for the last Test,
and after mopping up 16 English wickets a year earlier, he took none now.
His body language was never the same once he dropped Vaughan twice in
four overs on the fourth morning at Lord's, and one of the most infectious
smiles in world cricket had disappeared long before the end.
Kumar Sangakkara, who arrived with a Test average of 53 and a big
reputation as the face of the new, hard-nosed Sri Lanka, wasn't much better.
Like Jayasuriya, he failed to make a half-century in the Tests, and with the
runs went his angry-young-man routine. Mahela Jayawardene got to grips
with the conditions better than anyone, making three first-class centuries
including - finally - his first in an overseas Test, while Marvan Atapattu, as
in the series between the sides 15 months earlier, put all his eggs in one big,
First Test hundred.
If anything, the bowlers were even more disappointing. A lot was expected
of Chaminda Vaas, but he struggled to get any reverse swing and the final
step from 196 Test wickets to 200 took him a whopping 137 overs. In all,
he bowled 35 more overs than he had against England in 2000-01 for a
quarter of the wickets: he seemed to miss Mike Atherton. And while England
never truly mastered Murali, they certainly muzzled him. Against the left-handers,
Trescothick, Butcher and Thorpe, his wickets cost 93 runs and came
every 35 overs. Murali's overall strike-rate was a wicket every 95 balls -
only the second time in ten series that it had been over 60. The other time
had also been against England, testimony to the effectiveness of the forward
press that Duncan Fletcher had taught the batsmen to use against spin.
Dilhara Fernando, sidelined until the last Test with a stress fracture, did
show raw pace and a confidence trickster of a slower ball that sucked in
Vaughan and Hussain, but that was as good as it got. As a consequence, it
was a series of plenty for England's batsmen. Vaughan, after a feverish
performance in New Zealand, added a drop of discretion to his game and
arrived as a Test opener, while Trescothick and Butcher, like left-handed
incarnations of Graham Gooch and David Boon minus the bristle, gathered
run after run after run in their contrasting ways.
Only in their selection for Lord's did England take a backward step. The
public expected Alex Tudor and Ian Bell... and got Dominic Cork and John
Crawley. Both lasted one Test, though they would return later in the summer.
England started the series with Dad's Army and ended it with The Young
Ones. When Tudor, Hoggard - who came back well from a butterfly-stomach
display at Lord's - and Flintoff won the final Test with an almost Australian
relentlessness on a rock-hard Old Trafford pitch, the future looked bright
indeed. It was the first time since 1996 that England had won a Test without
Caddick, who broke down in his sixth over, or Darren Gough.
Hoggard, Tudor and Flintoff appeared on the cover of Wisden Cricket
Monthly in August, and a nation dreamed of them sharing the wickets in
Australia and bringing home the Ashes. It didn't quite work out like that -
they shared nothing more than eight wickets, six stitches and a dodgy hernia.
The Sri Lankans weren't alone in realising that the script is one thing, fantasy
entirely another.