On a pitch that assisted bowlers with sharp turn and variable bounce, Shreyas Iyer helped India post above par total

On the day before the Test, the pitch looked fairly benign, a standard Bangalore batting surface, but it turned out to be anything but. While the aim would have been to produce a pitch that assisted spinners, the authorities, curators and ground staff were definitely not aiming for something so spicy. It is learnt that the ground staff were not sure how much to water the surface and when, given the pink-ball and the night timings.

What resulted was too little watering and a pitch so dry that the first puff of dust was sighted as early as the fifth over, when Suranga Lakmal was bowling. The spinners came on early, and that’s when the actual nature of the surface revealed itself.

Lasith Embuldeniya got the ball to grip and turn from the first over he bowled, and while this would not have alarmed the batsmen too much, the lack of consistency in bounce certainly caught their attention.

Virat Kohli’s run of middling scores extended, but he could not be blamed on this instance. Dhananjaya de Silva got a ball sit low on the pitch and Kohli had already gone back in his crease to address the ball. When the bat missed the ball, he had no chance.

But, it wasn’t even that the ball was occasionally keeping low. Praveen Jayawickrama, the second left-arm spinner in the Sri Lankan attack, got prodigious bounce on occasion. This was a pitch where the Indian team realised very quickly that crease occupation, or the attempt of the same, was going to prove fruitless.

But even to attack in these conditions you need sound judgement of which shots to play, which to cut out, which areas too target and a balance between rotating the strike and hitting boundaries. Just trying to weather a spell from a spinner would mean it was a matter of time before a ball did something unexpected, defeating the stroke.

The player who came closest to overcoming the conditions and the bowlers was Shreyas. Early in his innings he picked up the length of a delivery early and pumped it through long on for a boundary. Soon after he did the same with one that was tossed up just a bit more, this time easing into the most gorgeous of cover drives, bisecting the two fielders stationed for just the shot.

As wickets fell at the other end, Shreyas got to an unlikely half-century. He had miscalculated just once in the course, attempting a switch hit early in his innings. From there on it was clever use of the angle of the bat, driving all in front of point and using the pace to guide the ball behind square on the off side.

Shreyas has a reputation of being one of the better players of spin in this batting line-up, and this stems from the fact that he has had to play so much domestic four-day cricket before getting his break in the Indian team.

When Shreyas was dismissed, the last batsman out, India had made it to 252. While that might look like a modest score, it was anything but. Shreyas, who was stumped on 92, had entertained the crowd while putting India in the driver’s seat, hitting four sixes, mostly down the ground, to go with 10 fours.

India will know that the lottery nature of the pitch has only reduced the gap between the two teams. If Sri Lanka were to have a chance of recording their maiden Test win in India, it was on a surface such as this. With that in mind you can be sure they will not be as profligate as Sri Lanka’s bowlers.

Even as the entire Indian innings was wrapped up in only 59.1 overs, Sri Lanka conceded 34 boundaries. Indian bowlers, the spin trio of Ravichandran Ashwin, Axar Patel and Ravindra Jadeja and the pace duo of Jasprit Bumrah and Mohamed Shami, would have observed this carefully, should they need reminding that accuracy is your best friend on a pitch that has exaggerated turn and regular variable bounce.

One thing you could be sure of after day one: this Test match was not going to go the distance, barring a miracle.

Sri Lanka were teetering at 86 for 6 at stumps on day one.

BRIEF SCORES

India 252 (Iyer 92, Pant 39, Vihari 31, Kohli 23; Jayawickrama 3/81, Embuldeniya 3/94) lead Sri Lanka 86/6 (Mathews 43; Bumrah 3/15, Shami 2/18) by 236 runs