Sri Lanka tour of England & Ireland 2014

[TheWall]

Yup. These days they have adopted the Lankans. Sanga againist SRT Matthews againist Kohli

That means even they agree that their players are crap....

[undisputed chap]

That means even they agree that their players are crap....

Atleast they are not comparing gotta khatmal or wannabe virat to :winky:virat

[thongale]

Guy took a lot of deserved flak in his first series as a captain for his defensive tactics against pakistan. but he has been great here in this test - contributed with ball and bat and has shown wonderful temperament. Sanga has been sublime all throughout the series but without matthews his performance would have been like Dravid in our last Eng tour

Unlike Pakistan, Poms sledged him and got him going. Mathews is very good it handing it over to the opposition. We can still remember how he handed Mitchell Johnson's **** back to him.

[thongale]

I believe Matthews is a tamil. Is that right? SL have Tamil skipper?

YEah, Tamil Catholic. This is not the first time a Sri Lankan team has a minority captain. Soccer teams from 80s to early 2000s had either Tamil or Muslim captains. But the LTTE diaspora wants people to think in other ways.

[vvvslaxman]

England enetered the last day 5 down I believe no team has ever drawn a game entering the last day 5 down! So great effort from england

Pakistan was 6 down entering 5th day http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/64125.html

[donks1]

Pakistan was 6 down entering 5th day http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/64125.html

yeah it's happened numerous times that i can remember. here's a sri lankan example http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/225264.html

[putrevus]

England deserve lot of credit to taking the match into last two balls with just 5 wickets, even with our greatest batting line up other than Napier we never put up that sort of resistance. Too many shameful collapses both home and away by Sachin, Dravid and co on last day robbing Indian team series wins.

[rkt.india]

England deserve lot of credit to taking the match into last two balls with just 5 wickets, even with our greatest batting line up other than Napier we never put up that sort of resistance. Too many shameful collapses both home and away by Sachin, Dravid and co on last day robbing Indian team series wins.

Conditions play a huge role too.

[putrevus]

Conditions play a huge role too.

when you collapse against shaun udal like nine pins then it is more than conditions it is the toughness which our great middle order never had inspite of the talent and skill they possessed. Where are the gritty draws which they eeked out.

[Gollum]

Brilliant from Lanka. Great series this, pity it was only 2 match series, should have been 3/4 match series. Lanka having its best year in cricket.

[Pakistan]

Good job Sri Lanka. Is this their first test series win on English soil?

[vayuu1]

Good job Sri Lanka. Is this their first test series win on English soil?

Nope 2nd sent from dil se

[vvvslaxman]

Good job Sri Lanka. Is this their first test series win on English soil?

First full series. Yes. Others are not considered as series. One off test.

[putrevus]

To call two test a series and as series win is bit too much, a series should at least have three tests, it is not SL's fault. It is ECB's fault who thought they will roll over SL easily.

[vvvslaxman]

Why Headingley failed to draw large crowds for England v Sri Lanka Test http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/jun/25/headingley-crowds-england-sri-lanka-test Long before England’s Jimmy Anderson fended the brutal fifth ball of the last over of a fluctuating, absorbing and ultimately dramatic second Test, the people of Yorkshire had spoken. Even the reduction of admission prices to £5 for adults, and free entry for juniors, could not lure 2,500 to Headingley on the fourth Tuesday in June. The ground had been almost as empty the previous day against Sri Lanka, with only 3,989 in attendance, and even on Sunday, when tickets cost a reasonable £20 and £5 for concessions, a crowd of 6,700 left Headingley – whose capacity of 16,000 is the smallest of the six venues staging Tests this summer – more than half empty. David Ryder, Yorkshire’s operations director, has worked at every Headingley Test since 1976 and argues that while there is a danger of viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles – there were probably only a couple of thousand in the ground for the start of the last day of the famous 1981 match, which was also a Tuesday – the situation is grim. “The dynamics of it have changed,” Ryder said. “In the olden days – up to about 15 or 20 years ago – the members got in for free as part of the cost of their membership, so you had a decent audience there to start with. With everybody else it would be see what the weather’s like, how the match is, and make a decision to rock up on the day. “We used to take shedloads of cash on the turnstiles, people paying their seven or eight pound or whatever it was, to sit on what were basically wooden benches. I think now there’s been this change to reserved seating, and people think it’s going to be sold out, so they don’t even think about buying a ticket on the day.” He added: “I remember that ’81 Test, and although there weren’t so many there at the start, the crowd really built up through the day as word spread of what might be happening, and people left work early or whatever. By the end we had more like 9,000 in.” Yorkshire’s chief executive, Mark Arthur, points out that the aggregate attendance of 38,062 for this year’s Headingley Test was significantly better than the 29,000 for the 2013 game against New Zealand. He argues that small step in the right direction is down to a combination of pricing, marketing and a slightly later date, having welcomed the move of the early-season series from May to June. But next year Yorkshire have again been saddled with a New Zealand Test in May as they continue to pay the penalty for the financial problems that ruled out bidding for one of the more lucrative packages of international fixtures, including Tests in the second series of the summer against more attractive opposition – India this year, and Australia in 2013 and 2015. There is more to it than timing, though, as Arthur and Ryder concede. Yorkshire had much bigger crowds for the first May Test they staged, against West Indies in 2007, but that was when the memories of the classic Ashes series of 2005 were still fresh – having been watched by millions on Channel 4, the last series to have been screened on terrestrial television – and when England were captained by Michael Vaughan. The present national team have a stronger Yorkshire influence numerically, through Gary Ballance, Liam Plunkett and Vaughan’s Sheffield protege Joe Root. “But I’m not sure our members are connected to them like they were to people like Darren Gough,” Ryder said. “Goughie played much more county cricket, and we used to see crowds going up by a couple of thousand when he was playing for us. It was more like it is across at the [Leeds] Rhinos, where the fans see their England players like Ryan Hall and Kallum Watkins every week. Joe Root won’t play much for Yorkshire now.” That is not the only area in which Yorkshire may be suffering for the attitude that prevailed for more than a decade at the England and Wales Cricket Board – but which has softened in the last couple of years – of the interests of the national team coming first, with daylight second and county cricket trailing somewhere in the distance. Yorkshire’s membership has halved during that period, robbing them of a core market for international tickets. Cricket would have been a hard sell this summer anyway, given the competing attractions of the World Cup and, in Yorkshire, the Grand Départ of the Tour de France. But the truth that dare not speak its name, so worried are the counties about upsetting the ECB, is that the England team have also become a tarnished brand, mostly because of the winter’s Ashes shambles but also unsavoury episodes such as the messy divorce with Kevin Pietersen and even peeing on The Oval pitch when the Ashes were won last August. The governing body might try to refute that by pointing to far better sales for the India series, with the first Test at Trent Bridge virtually sold out, but Lancashire and especially Hampshire, who will stage two of the later matches, are finding tickets much harder to shift. There will be some timely evidence that Yorkshire has not fallen out of love with cricket, as Headingley will be packed to the rafters for Friday night’s Twenty20 Blast fixture against Lancashire. Perhaps all those blue empty seats on Tuesday were a verdict not on the game but on the England team, and even on the administration of cricket in this country. The accidental hilarity provoked by the advertisement for a “people and culture director” reinforced the impression created by the exacting dietary demands of the England team in Australia last winter, of an organisation in danger of disappearing up its own backside. In that context, the quiet promotion of Colin Graves – the Costcutter millionaire who has already saved Yorkshire from bankruptcy and is now vice-chairman to Giles Clarke at the ECB – to a new and influential role as the chairman of the board’s commercial committee could be the week’s most significant development of all.

[RedFever]

To call two test a series and as series win is bit too much, a series should at least have three tests, it is not SL's fault. It is ECB's fault who thought they will roll over SL easily.

It is SL's fault. They are not crowd pullers. ECB can't afford to host SL in front of empty stadiums.

[RedFever]

no wonder they scheduled a two-test series.

[Pakistan]

First full series. Yes. Others are not considered as series. One off test.

I remember watching that test in 1997. Murli took 16 or 17 wickets in that test.

To call two test a series and as series win is bit too much, a series should at least have three tests, it is not SL's fault. It is ECB's fault who thought they will roll over SL easily.

It is all down to pure greed. Test against India will make more money for ECB than a test against Sri Lanka. That is why India will play five test while Sri Lanka played only two test. I agree with your main point that each test series should have minimum 3 test.

[putrevus]

It is SL's fault. They are not crowd pullers. ECB can't afford to host SL in front of empty stadiums.

unless you give them a chance how will they become crowd pullers. Both tests went full distance until last but one ball what more a paying customer would you want , I dont see how it is SL's fault but if they trumpet this as some kind of great achievement they need to pipe down, if there was a third test they were going to lose without any doubt.

[singhprakash72]

YEah' date=' Tamil Catholic. This is not the first time a Sri Lankan team has a minority captain. Soccer teams from 80s to early 2000s had either Tamil or Muslim captains. But the LTTE diaspora wants people to think in other ways.[/quote'] Hope he is kept out of the controversy, as he is a Sri Lankan first, and not forced to speak out for any sides like Muralitharan had to during IPL blackout in Chennai for SL players.