As Sri Lanka begin to look through what already appears to be a wreck of a Test series, they may begin to scan these roiling waters for positives they can throw a life-ring to. Sri Lankan cricket has collectively lowered its standards over the past 10 years, so there is no longer a search for the next Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardene, TM Dilshan et. al. Averages of 50-plus are anyway rare in Test cricket right now, and in terms of batting, globally, great batters are a little thin on the ground.
But Sri Lanka will happily take a few good long-term run-producers. And on that front, day three of the second Test saw two young batters prosper. Sonal Dinusha, who remains unbeaten on 85 and has easily been Sri Lanka's best batter of the series, is the obvious option. He has already made the case for long-term investment, his sweeping of spin perhaps the best for any new batter since Kusal Mendis first broke into the scene. Then there was the 80 from Pasindu Sooriyabandara, who punished the shorter lengths beautifully on either side of the pitch, dusted off a mean sweep and an excellent reverse, and suggested in battling through some skillful bowling in the afternoon that he deserves more chances at this level even when the three first-choice batters missing from this top order return.
But friends of Lankan cricket, listen. We've been here before. Other batters have had bright starts in Test cricket. Some have even had incandescent ones. And yet Sri Lanka is here, again, being crushed in another Test series by a top opponent at home. If Sri Lanka lose this Test, it will be the seventh successive match they have lost to India on home soil. They have also lost each of their last five Tests at home against England, if you can believe that. In Australia's last tour to the island, they swept Sri Lanka 2-0. When will these nightmares end?
The truth is, we don't really know. Dinusha has been spectacular in this series, and as he is undismissed in the second innings during the writing of this sentence, he averages 134.50. (Series top-scorer Devdutt Padikkal, meanwhile, averages a paltry 109.33.) Dinusha provided further evidence of his exemplary sweeping capabilities through the course of day three, while also proving something else - he can rein in portions of his game as required. All six fours and two sixes in his innings so far have come on the leg side. When India left those boundaries open, he hit there.
Sooriyabandara, playing his first real innings (it should not count as a debut if you get thrown in the deep end as a concussion sub), defended nicely and left the seamers well, when it was still moving off the deck early in the day.
If you have followed Sri Lankan cricket closely enough though, these feel like just nice things to say about new players. Do such talents tend to, you know, win the actual matches? You saw the paragraph above about matches lost at home, right? The numbers are not pretty. Sri Lanka batters can sometimes come in hot, but lose momentum when opposition analysts get hands on their match footage, and the stats models get put to work.
Going back a generation, Dinesh Chandimal and Lahiru Thirimanne hit half-centuries at the SCG in 2013, suggesting they were the new No. 3 and 4, before each running into trouble. Chandimal fell so frequently to the bouncer in 2014 he was yanked out of the Test side. Thirimanne went 14 innings without a fifty early in his career, and batted in 54 innings between his first century and his second. Dimuth Karunaratne went through a haunting loss of form in 2016 that eventually got him dropped. Kusal Mendis made five ducks in a row in Test cricket, which got him dropped also.
You get it. Even Sri Lanka batters who have produced great innings struggle to be consistent matchwinners. Kusal Perera's 153* in Durban may be the greatest Test innings in the history of this game. But his Test career has been mediocre either side it.
Many Sri Lanka batters fight back from the regression stage. Chandimal is the owner of an outstanding 16 Test centuries, and has been one of Sri Lanka's most reliable batters of the 2020s. Karunaratne developed new wings to his game and became very arguably the island's best Test batter to debut after 2010. Kusal Mendis has found his way back as a batter who plays down the order and keeps wicket. Thirimanne had a late-career revival as an opener, but soon migrated to Australia and made himself unavailable.
The player we are dancing around is Kamindu Mendis. In 2024, he averaged 74.92. Back then, team-mates used to tease him when he didn't hit a hundred in a Test. It has now been 18 innings since he reached triple figures, his average since November 2024 down at 29.23. On Tuesday at the SSC, he hit a largely harmless Prasidh Krishna delivery straight to midwicket and was out for 32, which is his highest score of the series so far.
Dinusha and Sooriyabandara have offered some new hope, but the system has shown over years that it is not producing batters who can sustain their excellence. (Pathum Nissanka may be the exception, but even he had long injury layoffs from Test cricket.) For more than a decade now, Sri Lanka batters have almost routinely endured a regression stage.