SL’s batting vs SA’s bowling with crucial WTC points at stake

On By Littum

It couldn’t have been more deliciously set up. South Africa and Sri Lanka will play in what is effectively a World Test Championship (WTC) quarter-final over the next two weeks. Both believe they have built outfits that can challenge for the title next June.

If that sounds like an overtly optimistic thing to say, consider who we’re talking about. During the last two WTC cycles, South Africa lost more than half of the series they played in, while Sri Lanka finished in the middle and bottom half of the points table. These are teams that have spent a significant amount of time, especially recently, talking about transition phases and building blocks. Now it sounds like they are ready to move from the ground floor and potentially reach the lift to the roof if they come to Lord’s next June.

Both captains spoke of their current squad as “the best we’ve had in a long time,” as Dhananjaya de Silva put it, though for very different reasons. For Sri Lanka, who have won six of their last eight Tests and crossed 400 four times in that period, they have the capacity for a batting line-up they can trust to perform in different conditions and the numbers to prove it.
Kamindu Mendis is Sri Lanka’s leading run scorer in this WTC cycle and seventh overall, while Dhananjaya is 11th with three hundreds and six fifties. For context, South Africa has only one batsman in the top 40, and he is in 39th place: David Bedingham. Mendis also leads the average in this edition of the WTC (with a cut-off of 10 innings), with Dhananjaya fifth. Together they have scored eight of Sri Lanka’s 11 hundreds; the other three have come from three different players. Mendis’s hundreds have come in Sylhet, Manchester and Galle, which speaks to the ability to transfer talent across what Dhananjaya called increasingly tough conditions for run scoring everywhere.

“It’s hard to run anywhere in the world,” he said. “If you go to Sri Lanka, it spins. And if we go to England, it’s going to dip. When we come here (to South Africa), it’s going to bounce. It’s always hard work for the batsman. But we have got some experience, people who played a lot of cricket here and a lot of cricket in England, a lot of cricket in Sri Lanka. In this team there is experience and youth. So I think it is the best team after a long time and we have to get the best out of it.”

South Africa have something similar, not necessarily in numbers, but in the sources of their achievements, which come from a wide spread of players. The seven hundreds they have scored in this cycle have each come from a different batter and five of them are from batsmen scoring hundreds for the first time. For a line-up without any standout superstars (and you could argue one that was overly reliant on Dean Elgar of late, but AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla before that) showing progression in both domestic depth and their ability to step up.

“We have had different players perform,” Temba Bavuma said. “Younger guys have come into this room and they’re starting to perform. With me as a senior player, I take a lot of pleasure in seeing the young guys come into the team and I try to contribute to them being so good as they may be.”
It will probably come as no surprise to hear that what South Africa lack in batting, they make up for in their bowling. Kagiso Rabada tops the bowling average among bowlers who have bowled more than 100 balls in this cycle, with Keshav Maharaj not too far behind. Overall, South Africa have the second lowest bowling average of 24.13 in this WTC. Yes, Rabada steals the headlines here, but for good reason. His career wickets of 313 are just 16 less than the entire Sri Lanka six-man attack and we cannot forget that he has always had strong support. It’s not Lungi Ngidi and Anrich Nortje this time, but Marco Jansen and Gerald Coetzee, who are two of the fastest around.

All this makes the battle lines clear: this series will be decided by how Sri Lanka’s batsmen take on South Africa’s attack, even on surfaces that are not expected to be too seamer-friendly. Given the way they played in England, where they won at The Oval, Sri Lanka have every reason to believe they will be able to challenge South Africa at two venues where they have had success before. “We didn’t have a bad series in England but the results didn’t come our way. We played good cricket and we pressured the England team,” said Dhananjaya. “We will push the South African team to the end.”

And South Africa, having won their first series in the subcontinent for 10 years last month, also have reason to be bullish as they retain faith in a group of players who will form the core of the future of the Test team. “In this series there are no new faces so we are definitely settling in as a team and the guys are very comfortable with each other,” Bavuma said. “It was about putting together this team of personalities, guys who can effectively do something special for the team. For me, there is a sense of something special that can come to this team. And I think we have four or five matches to do such a thing.”

Four? Certainly because that is the number of matches both South Africa and Sri Lanka have left in this cycle.

Five? Whoever wins at least one of the next two can start dreaming of that final realistically next year.

Let the trial summer begin.

With statistical input from S Rajesh and Shiva Jayaraman