Whitewashers to whitewashees?

If you are a Sri Lanka fan with plans to come to the picturesque Newlands ground to watch your team play in the New Year Test, perhaps you will think to do something more useful with your money, like feed it to a goat.

At Port Elizabeth, Sri Lanka’s five-Test winning streak was punctured. The Australia-series bubble was popped. Reality set in.

In place of the optimism of the last few months in which five consecutive Tests were won and promising players bucketed down upon the island, there is now sudden fear the whitewashers could become whitewashees. Before the series, the Port Elizabeth pitch seemed the low-slow promised land. It was thought Sri Lanka could ease themselves into the series with manful batting and Rangana Herath’s sleight of hand. Instead Herath’s fingers took a battering, and the batsmen wound up nursing blows to their outside edges. Watching the edges of your bat blush redder and redder through the course of several weeks has recently become the essence of a Sri Lanka batsman’s away tour.

And you can see the parallels with the Australia series can’t you? Due to a quirk of scheduling, that tour had begun in Pallekele, where Australia hoped to establish their dominance on one of the most seam-friendly pitches on the continent. Instead they were mugged by Sri Lanka’s trio of spinners there, before being led down an alley and merrily stabbed at Galle. At the …

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