Sri Lanka goes one up in I-Cup finals

When a captain wins the toss on a perfect batting strip, like the one at Mohali, and decides to bat - knowing fully well that the opposing team's strength is batting, and that they are more than capable of a long, hard chase - he probably dreams of how his own batsmen will perform.

The most optimistic of captains, dreaming of the most optimistic of scenarios, would not however have come up with a batting card that goes - Jayasuriya 96 (off 67 with 12 fours and one six), Atapattu 53 (off 72 with four fours), Aravinda D'Silva 90 (off 90, with ten fours and a six) and Ranatunga 80 (off 70, with eight fours and a six), to produce a card reading Sri Lanka 339 for four off 50 overs.

And when you look at it, that card would have been even more impressive had two wickets - those of the captain and the vice captain - not fallen off the very last over of the innings, to the bowling of Saqlain Mushtaq, when neither batsman was interested in anything but trying to hit the ball into the seventh dimension.

The temptation, when you see a card like that, is to imagine that the opposing team missed its frontline bowlers (in this case Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Mushtaq Mohammed). That the standins for the stars bowled badly. That the fielders were shoddy. And such, and so forth.

Viewed very objectively, though - and when writing this, it is with the benefit of hindsight, and with having viewed the entire innings twice more, on video - such excuses would be self-deceiving. On the day, you could have lined up the best bowlers in the world, let alone in Pakistan, and the result would have been pretty much the same.

True, the Pakistan fielders erred twice - once, in letting off Jayasuriya (who had earlier been caught off a no ball) when he was 53 and the second time, when they dropped Atapattu with that batsman in his forties.

True, two, the fall of those two wickets would have made some difference. But precisely what that difference would have been, is debatable in context of the innings Aravinda D'Silva, coming back to form at precisely the right moment, and Ranatunga, shedding his sloth-bear image and blazing away as though he intended to prove a point to his more established stars, played.

If Jayasuriya was the assassin, holding the bat with his customary grip low down and clubbing every ball he got, irrespective of such irrelevancies as length and line and direction or even field placing, then Atapattu was the perfect wheelman, driving the getaway car. The young batsman, filling the spot in the side left by the controversial exit of Asanka Gurusinghe, played his innings with immaculate perfection, ensuring that the bowlers never got away from the firing line. Each time he came on strike, his intention was clear - get the single and expose the bowlers, yet again, to the firepower of Jayasuriya.

Such a partnership is hard enough to bowl to, let alone check. But what is even worse, for the fielding side and its bowlers, is the sort of partnership D'Silva and Ranatunga put together - for here, both batsmen were intent on mayhem. True, Aravinda did play, at least initially, with some finesse, letting the ball come on and getting a few in the middle of the bat to break his rather uncharacteristic run of low scores of late - but once he began hearing the sweet thud of ball striking the sweet spot, he like a virtuoso conductor took the music into overdrive and suddenly, no line was the right line, no length was good enough. Ranatunga, for his part, helped the game plan along by eschewing his customary nudges, pushes and glides into the gaps, preferring to take a firm, low-down grip on the bat and hit with every ounce of muscle in his podgy frame.

One indicator suffices of the Sri Lankans total mastery on the day - Saqlain Mushtaq, easily the best off spinner in the world and one who, of late, has been entrusted with the final overs even when the Pakistan team is at full strength, went for 72 off his 10 overs, his two wickets coming in the very final over - and the talented young offie hasn't seen such figures against his name thus far in his international career, not even when his bowling was much more raw.

Against that kind of card, Pakistan had only one hope - that the brutal bludgeon of Shahid Afridi and the stylish scalpel of Saeed Anwar would, working together in the beginning, carve up a Lankan attack sans Chaminda Vaas, knock a huge hole in the target, and permit the rest of the Pak batting lineup to settle down for the chase.

In the event, however, Anwar managed just 14, Afridi 18, and Pakistan in the first ten overs had lost three wickets - including pinch hitter Mohammad Hussain - for 49. The rest of the 40 overs were, from that stage on, totally irrelevant - there was no way a side was coming back from that kind of a start to a chase of this magnitude, and Pakistan apparently realised it, for they just kept pushing the score along as best they could, obviously more concerned to reduce the eventual winning margin than to really make a fight of it.

In the event, Sri Lanka cantered off with a 115-run win - a margin that would have been considerably higher had not Moin Khan, for once coming out to bat with sufficient overs to go, not played a lovely unbeaten innings of 57 off 61 deliveries.

So what did Pakistan do wrong? Nothing much, really - their task was pretty hopeless even before they started it. The trouble with any chase where the asking run rate is above six an over is that it is not enough for batsmen to lay into any one bowler - they have to get every single one of the opposing bowlers away, big time. Again, it is not enough for a batsman to have one great over, hitting a couple of lovely boundaries - he has to keep doing that, over after over.

True, that is what the Lankans did - but the Lankans were playing without the pressure of a specific target over their heads. Their gameplan was to hit and keep hitting, and let the score be what it may. For Pakistan, however, there was that Everest of runs looming all the time - and every step they took, every four they hit, was just another reminder of how many more boundaries remained to be hit, how many more steps there were to take before the Everest of expectations could be scaled.

And so, Sri Lanka one-up in the three match series - with the second game to be played, at the Eden Gardens, on Monday. Lanka will obviously look to wrap it up, without having to play the final on Tuesday. Pakistan, on the other hand, will look to pull one back and force the best of three final into the full distance. Could go either way - but on form, the temptation would be to put the shirt on the world champions, with perhaps a little button of a bet on the outside chance of Pakistan pulling back from the massacre at Mohali.

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