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Australia counter strongly after Chandimal ton
- Updated: August 14, 2016
Australia 141 for 1 (S Marsh 64*, Smith 61*) trail Sri Lanka 355 (Chandimal 132, De Silva 129, Starc 5-63, Lyon 3-110) by 214 runsScorecard and ball-by-ball details
As a sign of what was to come, the first hour of this Test was less accurate than a horoscope. When Sri Lanka collapsed to 26 for 5, nobody would have predicted they would go on to the highest total of the series. Nor, for that matter, that Australia would then bat as well as they have at any time on this tour. But that was the case, for after those first five wickets tumbled in roughly an hour, the next 11 hours of the Test have brought only five more.
On the second day, Dinesh Chandimal scored the seventh century of his Test career, an innings of immense patience that pushed – sometimes at the pace of a boulder up a hill – Sri Lanka to 355. Australia, in reply, had moved to 141 for 1 at the close of play. Only once in this series had an Australian scored a fifty, but now two did so in a session. Steven Smith was on 61 and Shaun Marsh was on 64, and their 120-run stand was comfortably Australia’s best of the series.
There still remained plenty of work for Australia’s batsmen, particularly considering their allrounders begin at No.5, but at least they had started impressively. Marsh, included for the first time in this series at the expense of opener Joe Burns, looked relatively comfortable against Sri Lanka’s spinners. He used his feet well, worked the ball through leg and punished through off when given width. And importantly, he often picked the turn out of the hand.
There were nervous moments for Marsh, balls that turned past the bat, a big lbw review late in the day that found the ball pitching outside leg, an edge that …
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