Sri Lanka battle conditions to stay in touch with Proteas

THE Sri Lankan batsmen matched their Standard Bank Proteas counterparts in finding it difficult to convert starts into substantial contributions on the second day of the first Sunfoil Test match at St. George’s Park on Tuesday. The end result was that there is unlikely to be much between the two sides on the first innings. When bad light forced an early finish to day two Sri Lanka trailed by 105 runs with three wickets in hand but one of them is their leading contributor to date, Dhananjaya de Silva (43 off 69 balls and 5 fours so far).
In all, five of the Sri Lankan batsmen got into double figures but the best partnership was the meagre 39 for the fourth wicket between Angelo Mathews and Kaushal Silva which followed an early collapse against Kyle Abbott and Vernon Philander of 3/22. Philander finished the day as the most successful South African bowler with figures of 3/35 in 16 overs and, like Suringa Lakmal who took his maiden five-wicket haul, he will be looking for another five-wicket haul to add to the 10 he has already taken. The game settled down after a hectic morning session which saw seven wickets fall for 56 runs 21.5 overs as the Proteas first lost their last four wickets for 19 runs to have their hopes of a 300 plus total firmly extinguished and then a similar collapse in the Sri Lanka top order that saw them 37/3 at the lunch interval. They repaired the damage to some extent with 67/2 in the afternoon session and then 77/2 in the shortened final session.
With the batsmen on both sides continuing to struggle against the conditions with the seamers having taken 13 of the 17 wickets to have fallen in the match so far, a four-day Test match looks very much on the cards.