Sri Lanka aggressively running away from being aggressive

Transition is a funny thing in cricket. Teams playing badly sometimes pretend they are rebuilding, in order to manufacture some good will. Other times, players who are tipped to lead the side into a bold new age wither at the top level and unsuspected others bloom.

Sri Lanka are presently grappling with this whole process. Their XI contains a clump of cricketers who have sparkled in patches, without truly taking grip of their destiny. This transition has also created uncertainty on another front.

Sri Lanka players speak of being "positive and aggressive", because clearly, in the modern game, players are summarily executed if they don't use either of those words for a day. Sometimes they even play that way - as they did in the back end of the Galle Test.

But other times, as at the P Sara Oval on day two, Sri Lanka are anything but positive. They are aggressively running away from being aggressive. India have committed to a manifesto of attack - maybe they had even overcommitted to it, given they have slightly backtracked through their selection of Stuart Binny. Sri Lanka give off the sense that they don't have a pre-ordained idea of what kind of cricket to play. They are simply batting, bowling and fielding with no deference to an overarching philosophy. Some situations demand belligerence so they reverse-wallop spinners against the turn on a dry tack. Today they felt watching and waiting was the route forward.

They waited first on Friday for the lower-order wickets to come. Later in the day, Virat Kohli would pack the slip cordon with bodies even for Binny's bowling, but Sri Lanka's plan had been to squeeze instead. They denied Wriddhiman Saha quick runs, put the bait on the hook, and just awaited the mistake. They were unlucky not to have Amit Mishra for 0 when a thin edge went undetected by the umpire. Though that stand would eventually swell to 46, Sri Lanka maintained composure.

"We just thought of being patient in the morning session," Kaushal Silva said of their approach. "We had to restrict runs. They had bowlers to come, but we didn't take them lightly. Amit Mishra batted well. Saha batted well, too. I thought we restricted them to a good total."

In the next two sessions it was Sri Lanka's turn to frustrate. They were comically slow at times, and each of the top-four batsmen seemed almost painfully out of touch. Some have remarked that the P Sara crowd has been sparse given the occasion, but maybe the Colombo public is just judicious. Why put yourself through the heat and humidity for this two-session replay of the forward defense? Even the runs Sri Lanka scored were sometimes unintentional. Silva ducked a short ball from Ishant Sharma, but the ball collected bat anyway, and flew to the fence behind the keeper. Next over he wanted to push Umesh Yadav into the off side, but got another boundary to fine leg.

Sometimes, unable to thwart India with skill, Sri Lanka could only impede them in more prosaic ways. When a cluster of firecrackers went off during the first over of Kumar Sangakkara's innings, he backed away from the crease and waited for them to stop exploding. Many overs later, at the non-striker's end, he dropped his bat in front of the stumps just as Binny was about to enter his delivery stride, forcing the bowler to abort the delivery and trudge back to his mark.

Then there were the chances. Silva was caught behind off Binny for 14, but reprieved when the bowler was shown to have overstepped. Sangakkara having made the kind of jerky start typical of his early years, was dropped on 24. He eventually fell to the same bowler-fielder combination, though. Having perished in exactly the same way all through this series, Sangakkara has seemed more irrigation channel than all-time great batsman - his main purpose in life to redirect R Ashwin deliveries towards Ajinkya Rahane at slip.

It was telling that Silva - who does an important job for Sri Lanka, but is basically a sleeping pill attached to a bat - emerged from his partnerships with Sangakkara and Lahiru Thirimanne with the superior strike rate. The 107 balls that Silva and Thirimanne faced together yielded only two fours. When edges kept being beaten, and lbw shouts continued to be raised, it sometimes seemed like India had the Sri Lanka batsmen nailed to the cross, only they somehow continued to draw laboured breath.

Though Sri Lanka played this way today, tomorrow may be completely different. That is the thing about this Sri Lanka transition, you never know what you will get. Often they have kept in touch with opposition sides on dreary days like this, then hurtled into control on the back of a rollicking knock or a sublime spell.

Fans will probably turn up in greater numbers for the last three days. They will hope, of course, for runs from Sangakkara, because his staggering career deserves better than a limp finish. For their sake, maybe their team's more entertaining avatar will turn up as well.