Australia's staggering home record

Any team that tours Australia starts off as the underdog, and the Sri Lankans will be under no illusions about the enormity of the task that awaits them over the next few weeks. They haven't yet won a Test there in eight tries, and have lost six. Add the fact that Australia have only lost two out of 44 home Tests since 2000, and haven't been beaten at the Gabba, the venue of the first Test, since the 1988-89 season (winning 13 and drawing five since then), and the job ahead for Sri Lanka comes into sharper focus.

Teams are generally expected to be better at home than overseas, but Australia have been almost unstoppable at home this decade: they've only lost two home Tests, of which one was a dead-rubber game - against England in Sydney, after Australia had already won the first four Tests of the series. Their only defeat in a live game was in Adelaide against India in 2003-04, when Rahul Dravid engineered a four-wicket victory.

With the return of Marvan Atapattu, Sri Lanka have an experienced pair at the top of the order, but one look at the table below will indicate that Atapattu and Sanath Jayasuriya will probably have the toughest job among all batsmen on tour. Since 2000 visiting openers have struggled the most to adjust to the pace and bounce in Australia, averaging less than 30 runs per dismissal. The batsmen at one-drop do slightly better, while the No. 4s have been the ones with the most success in the last seven years.

The numbers below also indicate just how much better the Australian top three - spots which have mostly been occupied by Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting - have been than the corresponding opposition batsmen: Australia's openers average almost twice as many runs per dismissal as the visiting openers, while the average for the Australian No. 3 is more than double that of the opposition's.

Add up all the differences in the last column of the table (the last one, 7.92, needs to be multiplied four times since it combines the batsmen from Nos. 8 to 11, while the first one needs to be multiplied by two) and the grand total is 189, which is the average difference between the number of runs scored by Australia and the opposition.

Since 2000 only eight overseas openers have scored more than 200 runs in Australia, of which the outstanding numbers belong to the only two right-handers in the list. Michael Vaughan and Virender Sehwag have played some sensational innings in Australia, but for the rest - all left-handers - their visits down under have scarcely been memorable. Only six of those eight openers average more than 25 - the out-of-favour Andrew Strauss and New Zealand's Mark Richardson are the two who don't make that cut.

Visiting middle orders have had a much better time, though, which should be good news for the likes of Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara. The list of batsmen in the top six is dominated by Indians, thanks to the sensational series that Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar had when India toured there last, in 2003-04.

Sri Lanka's most experienced batsmen, on the other hand, haven't quite worked out the Australian pitches yet. Jayasuriya and Atapattu are the only ones to score Test centuries here, but neither has consistently been among the runs. Sangakkara has done better, with two fifties in four innings, but Jayawardene hasn't managed one in four innings so far. With no Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne to contend with, though, Sri Lankan supporters will hope those numbers change very quickly over the next three weeks.