Lionhearted Sri Lanka complete great escape

Seven Sri Lankan batsmen passed fifty and one of them, captain Mahela Jayawardene, went on to make a hundred as they infuriated England by stubbornly defending their way to a draw. Here's what the papers had to say about an escape Houdini would have been proud of.

"Stranger things have happened," said Kumar Sangakkara after Sri Lanka had lost two wickets in the second innings, "but if we get out of this it will be one of the great escapes in Test history." They did, and it was. Read David Hopps' account of events in The Guardian

Hope metamorphosed into an extremely rare sort of triumph for Sri Lanka yesterday as mounting embarrassment turned into something of a cricketing debacle for England, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times.

England dropped nine catches in the match, three on the fifth day. Steve James says in The Guardian that Duncan Fletcher, though he showed no outward sign, must have been seething inside.

But Geoffrey Boycott says that dropped catches were not solely to blame for England's inability to win. He says that they were lazy in the mind.

Predictions of an England victory before Sunday was over were almost as wild as the Met Office's warnings of a weekend wash-out, writes David Llewellyn in The Independent.

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