After the defeat in the P Sara Test to New Zealand Graham Ford, the Sri Lanka coach, has said his team had to improve on their batting against pace ahead of the three-Test series in Australia, which starts December 14 in Hobart.
Sri Lanka have only a three-day warm-up match against a Chairman’s XI at Canberra to put right their shortcomings ahead of the Test series.
“I was hoping that we would have a very good Test series against New Zealand which would be a fantastic way of preparing for the Australia series particularly as they have a useful seam outfit,” Ford said.
“If we could pass the test against this seam bowling we would know we were in quite a good position to take on Australia. Unfortunately we didn’t really pass the test with flying colours although there were quite a few batsmen that showed some decent form.
“I was hoping for a lot better than that but there were signs that we were starting to find our feet against pace, but what we are really gaining out of it (we had a chat about it as well) was that we now realise that we are not quite ready for the Australians. Once we get there the work that we do is going to be very intense. We are going to have to practise outside our comfort zone so that we are ready for what they are going to throw at us.”
Ford blamed the poor performances of the batsmen in the New Zealand series on playing too much one-day cricket. “We just slipped off our Test match process when it comes to batting,” said Ford. “It is part of international cricket these days having to switch from one format to the other we just had such a lot of instant cricket that Test match batting has been a long way away from their minds. In a very short space of time they had to try and switch that on and they didn’t switch it on as well as we had hoped to.
“Quite a number of our batsmen, although we got a few Test match specialists, have played a huge amount of T20 and ODI cricket in recent times and the Test match process hasn’t really been in their minds,” Ford said.
“Even though we talk about it, the nervous energy takes over and suddenly the body reverts back to the one-day processes. Also this last Test having had long hours on the field, the mind sometimes plays a few tricks and you are not quite as mentally tough as you should be for Test match cricket. Hopefully we were able to learn from all of that and really start to gear ourselves for much bigger scores.”
