Sri Lankan skipper Dhananjaya de Silva spoke up on whether his team needs to stop playing on spin-friendly pitches after the Lankans suffered a home Test series loss against Australia. Notably, Sri Lanka were helpless at their home ground as Australia dominated them in both the Test matches and ended up winning the series by 2-0. The visitors recently won the second Test by nine wickets in Galle to complete a series sweep.
After a humiliating loss, Dhananjaya de Silva was asked whether Sri Lanka needs to stop playing on spin-friendly tracks at home. To this, the Sri Lankan skipper replied, “There's definitely a question of whether [we] are playing spin very well as batters, we'll have to rethink that. If you looked at how they played, they scored a lot of runs square [of the wicket] and understood that it's hard to defend on these pitches. We couldn't apply that ourselves with the pressure that they put on us. We have to think about whether we keep playing on pitches like this, or on pitches better suited to us,” as quoted in Crictracker.
Out batting average is low because of batting in spin-friendly conditions: Dhananjaya de Silva
Speaking further, Dhananjaya de Silva also mentioned that batting in spin friendly pitches at home has also affected the batting average of the Sri Lankan batters. De Silva had a forgettable series where he could only amass 84 runs in four innings at an average of 21.
“As a batter, I do like playing in the other venues because my records there are better, if you take our batting averages, they're lower than those of batters in other countries, and you can see why that is - because we bat in spin-friendly conditions, it's hard to have an outstanding record on these pitches. But bowlers have to be very skillful to get wickets on good tracks too. Still, I think it's worth thinking about,” Dhananjaya de Silva further said.
