All Galle is preoccupied. Eight people were shot dead in Colombo a fortnight ago, and a suicide bombing in the capital has left few Sri Lankans in any doubt over the status of the ceasefire between their government and the Tamil Tigers in the east of the island. If ever the citizens of this old colonial port needed the reassuring normality of a cricket match it is now.
The problem for Graham Smith and his tourists, currently taking their whites out of mothballs and oiling cracking bats for a three-day tour match in the jumpy capital, is that the reassuring normality of a Galle Test generally involves 60 overs of Muttiah Muralitharan and four fielders chafing one’s shins and bottom with their cap badges.
Indeed, Smith will be under no illusions about the role the literally inimitable Muralitharan will play in the first Test, starting on Wednesday.
On the slippery slope of gamesmanship and pitch preparation, first comes the widely accepted ‘home advantageâ€. Then comes extreme prejudice in favour of the home attack. Then comes food-poisoning and midnight visits to the middle with pick-axes and shovels. And then there’s Galle.
Not that it’s a uniformly utopian pitch for spinners; not at all. Sometimes, if it’s been raining, and there’s a half-inch carpet of grass on a length, and the ball is new and wet, and Nicky Boje is bowling, it only turns about a foot.
Boje, of course, is the bowler who took one wicket in South Africa’s last outing at Galle, back in 2000, before Muralitharan took 13. Most spinners might have pondered the scorecard, perhaps meditated on the difference between one and 13, reviewed the conditions — a pitch on which Michael Schumacher would have spun — and realised their destiny was to become a forester or wheel-tapper.
But you can’t keep a good bad bowler down, and Nicky is back to keep deep-midwicket interested. To be fair, his performance wasn’t the worst on offer from the 2000 tourists.
With an attack opened by an exhausted Shaun Pollock and Jacques Kallis (it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing), the visitors were always up against it. About 522 first-innings runs later, and with Muralitharan waking up his wrist by poking it with a stick and feeding it white mice, the writing was already off the wall and onto the back pages.
Smith will be consoled by the fact that Sri Lanka have lost five consecutive Tests to Australia in the past five months. Or perhaps not. Any team that faces Australia for 25 days can only emerge stronger, tougher and hungrier.
The South Africans are hungry too, but that’s only because they’re malnourished. Somehow the West Indian candy-floss buffet of last season, and the lean, stringy cuisine of the New Zealand tour haven’t hit the spot: Smith’s team is slipping down the rankings, and although he’s been his usual frank and pugilistic self in press statements, there is the sense that the tourists are looking to survive rather than to win.
He’s right, though. With Chaminda Vaas creating rough outside the left-handers’ leg-stump, Smith, Jacques Rudolph and possible stand-in opener Andrew Puttick will have to contend with the ball turning across rather than away from them. Same direction, but what a difference it makes to the mind and the scoreboard not being able to drive or sweep —
Of course, knowing cricket, Muralitharan will take three for 80, and it will be the emaciated Upul Chandana, by now a genuinely threatening leg-spinner, who uses Vaas’s rough to run through the right-handers, leaving Lance Klusener unbeaten on 95, as he was in Colombo in 2000.
In fact, Klusener’s inclusion in the Test squad makes speculation a pleasant irrelevance. If he plays, how will we reconcile the man who struck 118* and 95* in consecutive Tests on the 2000 tour with the creature who spent much of the next year (his last at the top level) poking at good spin with all the confidence and dexterity of the Elephant Man brushing his teeth?
At least we’ll know soon enough: he’ll be, at most, six deliveries away from facing Muralitharan.
Their eloquence exhausted by the endless round of the international calendar, cricket scribes are opting more often for utilitarian frankness in their forecasts, pointing out that it takes 20 wickets to win a Test.
South Africa can expect to take around 15. Muralitharan can expect to take around eight. That’s his average at Galle, against all comers. But when did averages ever mean anything?