In the end the match turned on three Yorkies and a yorker. Vishwa Fernando had spent most of this series labouring as Sri Lanka’s second-best bowler called Fernando, but before all of that he started his summer with three matches for Yorkshire in the County Championship, and if he will have learned little about Joe Root and Harry Brook in that time – neither Englishman played in any of those games – it perhaps added a little piquancy to the moments after lunch when he got the ball swinging, and his two temporary kind-of-teammates walking.
Root came into this game averaging an implausible 116.66 in the series, and in their preparation Sri Lanka concentrated heavily on identifying ways of minimising his threat. “One of our main things in our mind will be how we are going to dismiss him,” the opener Dimuth Karunaratne said on Wednesday. “He is the one who has scored runs in this series and if we can get him out we can win this game.” He scored 13 in the first innings and 12 in the second, and if by the time Vishwa struck three wickets had already fallen it was when he arrowed the ball into Root’s boot, in his first over of the day, that Sri Lanka’s optimism turned to belief.
In his second over Vishwa trapped Brook, who like Root reviewed but turned for the dressing room upon sight of the first replay. From there only Jamie Smith’s blistering cameo, and Sri Lanka’s counterproductive determination to give Olly Stone a taste of his own medicine – in the shape of a few overs of heavily telegraphed and pretty innocuous bumpers – allowed England to emerge from their innings with either credit or, for all that their opponents swiftly batted it away again, hope.
It may be unfair, but it has also been impossible at times not to contrast events at the Oval this week with the last Test England played here – the conclusion of last summer’s Ashes, Stuart Broad’s farewell, that ball change, a thrilling festival of drama, noise and chaos.
It’s not that this is a lesser occasion – that was inevitable – or that the cricket has been less intense – likewise – it’s that it has often felt fundamentally trivial, occasionally flopping over the boundary fence into the downright silly. The stand-in captain, the middle-order batter asked to open, the giant debutant seamer with no first-class record to speak of, Chris Woakes bowling spin, overthrows and dropped catches, Saturday’s dark and dismal all-spin final session, Pope taking his DRS record as captain to none out of 10, the moment on Sunday when it was pouring on the JM Finn Stand while they were still sunbathing in the Galadari, England losing 14 wickets for 146 across the end of their first innings and the start of their second – it has all been a bit unserious.
Brendon McCullum’s side may, as he says, have refined their approach, but they have certainly not redefined it, and on Sunday Sri Lanka’s bowlers set about them like Storm Lilian attacked Leeds Festival at the end of last month: nasty, aggressive, but also probably not the kind of thing that would have been so destructive but for the fact that so many people were there for a good time, not a hard time. It may seem like an unnecessary precaution and the kind of behaviour that gets in the way of a good party, but if you don’t bother to peg out your tent, at the first gust of wind it might simply blow away.
None of Sri Lanka’s bowlers were in any mood for frivolity. Their coaches’ repeated and stinging criticism of their efforts on the opening day might have galvanised their spirit, as might the moment captured on the stump mic as Stone flung bouncers at Sri Lanka’s tail, and Asitha Fernando told Lahiru Kumara that they had just to “give him a taste of his own medicine”. The pair of them duly ripped into England’s top order.
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There was also the fact that for one team this innings represented a final chance to take something positive from their tour, and for the other, the series won, it might have felt merely like a minor inconvenience at the end of an intense summer. Once thoughts turn to home it can be hard to twist them back again, and perhaps it has helped Sri Lanka’s focus that, with a Test series against New Zealand starting as soon as next Wednesday, this is not really the end of anything.
Even beyond Dan Lawrence’s uncomfortable attempts at opening this has been a poor series for England’s top order. It says something that, of the team’s five biggest partnerships, three have involved Gus Atkinson. Only a couple of days ago some members of the England camp were speculating optimistically about the possibility of qualifying for next summer’s World Test Championship final, which would almost certainly require victory not only here but in every one of their six winter outings. Perhaps they were just messing around. Sometimes it is hard to tell.
