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The soft ball turned less sharply off the pitch, and the Khettarama surface itself has become easier to bat on. So said Sri Lanka’s interim head coach Nic Pothas, after Zimbabwe turned a scoreline of 59 for 5 into 252 for 6 by the end of the third day. The unbeaten pair of Sikandar Raza and Malcolm Waller have been most responsible for that turnaround, their partnership currently worth 107.”You’ve got to give credit to our players as well as the opposition,” Pothas said. “Once the hardness went out of the ball, it obviously became a bit more difficult, and it spun less than yesterday. I thought Raza played really well, as did PJ Moor and Waller.”But our guys were phenomenal. They did their jobs. I thought the quality of the fielding was superb. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ll get up again tomorrow morning, try to get a few quick wickets, and then chase a score.”Having conceded a first-innings lead of 10, Sri Lanka are presently looking at a fourth-innings chase north of 300, unless they can dismiss Zimbabwe quickly on the fourth morning. Only three times have teams successfully chased down targets of over 300 in Sri Lanka. One of those occasions had been against Zimbabwe, however – Sri Lanka hunting down 326 at the SSC in 1998.Sri Lanka will hope that, as Pothas says, the Khettarama pitch is not as treacherous as Rangana Herath predicted it would be, 24 hours prior. Both Pothas and cricket manager Asanka Gurusinha have put Sri Lanka’s performances in this Test largely down to conditions.”The pitch has changed quite a bit. Once the hardness went out of the ball today, it didn’t seem like it did as much as yesterday,” Pothas said. “Yesterday and day one the ball spun. At the end of the day we’re playing in the subcontinent and wickets spin. You just need to come up with plans to score, and how you’re going to get wickets. Today it was surprising that it didn’t do as much as expected, but we just need to find a way of getting wickets.”With Herath having claimed nine of the 16 Zimbabwe wickets to fall so far, there has been scrutiny about the performance of the remaining bowlers, who have gone through long spells without threatening to take wickets. Pothas, however, defended Sri Lanka’s quicks in particular, again ascribing their lack of wickets to conditions.”The amount of work those guys put in behind the scenes, and the effort they are putting in today with a soft ball, and a wicket that’s not conducive to fast bowling – I thought they did a fantastic job on it,” he said. “If we’re going to keep judging them, we need a bit of perspective. I think under the conditions they did a great job.”Though Sri Lanka have largely fielded well in this Test – Dimuth Karunaratne taking two especially sharp catches at slip in this innings – their fielding over the past few months has come in for stern criticism, particularly after the Champions Trophy defeat to Pakistan. Pothas, however, again defended the side on that front, suggesting they had turned a corner.”Are we judging them on one hour against Pakistan? I think we need to be careful on that, because in the first innings I thought we fielded phenomenally well. I think in general, we’ve been pretty harsh on them even when they put in good performances. I don’t think they get enough credit for it. When we played against South Africa at The Oval, I thought we fielded brilliantly. We fielded brilliantly against India. Then we had an hour of madness at the end of the Pakistan game, which was unfortunate. Since then we’ve done some pretty good stuff in the field, so I think we need to be a bit careful with always looking at the negative part of their fielding.”Sri Lanka dropped no fewer than six catches during the ODI series against Zimbabwe, however. Half of those chances were straightforward.

Among Mashrafe Mortaza, Tamim Iqbal and Mushfiqur Rahim, there was unanimity on one point: Bangladesh should have scored 20 more runs. England, through Joe Root, Alex Hales and Eoin Morgan, ended up cantering to their 306-run target.Two of them, Tamim and Mushfiqur, triggered the slowdown at a time when they could have instead pushed harder at the England bowlers. The third-wicket pair, who added 166 runs, fell to Liam Plunkett off consecutive deliveries in the 45th over, after which Shakib Al Hasan, Sabbir Rahman, Mahmudullah and Mosaddek Hossain could manage only five boundaries between them in the remaining 32 deliveries.Perhaps seniority was given preference after Tamim and Mushfiqur got out as it looked far more natural for Mahmudullah to get most of the remaining overs instead of Shakib or Sabbir, who aren’t as well-versed in slogging. Mahmudullah has been doing this role quite well since 2016, spreading out from his T20 exploits into the ODI arena. The latest example was the ODI against New Zealand last week, when he aced the chase in Clontarf. The Bangladesh team management decided otherwise.Mashrafe said that it was a problem when two set batsmen, Tamim having scored 128 and Mushfiqur 79, got out in quick succession. “After Tamim got out, Mushfiqur fell the next ball,” he said. “It was the problem for us. We still had Shakib, Mahmudullah and Sabbir but we couldn’t really go through those last six overs. I think we are 20 to 30 runs short, especially on that sort of wicket.”Mushfiqur, who had struck eight fours in his 72-ball knock, said that he didn’t execute the shot well, ending up giving a simple catch to long-on. But he said that had the subsequent batsmen contributed, a bigger total would have been still possible.”I knew that on that track you can’t get bogged down in the later part of an over,” he said. “I knew we needed a 330-plus total. Tamim got out and then the next ball I didn’t execute it well. If the other batsmen could have chipped in, in the last few overs, maybe it would have been a different ball game.”Tamim, who made a fabulous ninth ODI hundred, said that he put the bad ball away quite easily after riding out the initial two-paced nature of the pitch. “When we started the wicket was two-paced: once it was zipping and at other times it was coming slow,” he said. “So it was not that easy to hit big shots or hit down the line. But after the 10th over the wicket started to get better. And with a quick outfield I just batted normally.”I did not want to do anything special. I was taking one ball at a time. What I did today was I didn’t miss any boundary opportunity. Whenever I got the bad ball I made sure it went for a four or six.”Tamim suggested that the bowling must be better planned to defend any total. Bangladesh chose to play the extra batsmen and had to rely on Mosaddek, Soumya Sarkar and Sabbir Rahman to make up the overs. “The lesson is that 300 is not enough,” he said. “But whatever we score, if we don’t bowl to our plans then 400 is not enough too. We need to identify the mistakes we did while bowling and we need to rectify them and make sure next game we are ready. We just need to sit down and think where we could have done things differently.”

Moises Henriques was chosen ahead of batsmen including Usman Khawaja, Peter Handscomb, George Bailey and Cameron White – plus the allrounder James Faulkner – in an Australian Champions Trophy squad that also features recalls for James Pattinson and John Hastings.The omission of Faulkner from an Australian ICC event squad for the first time since 2011 marks a major change for the selectors, who have also determined that Henriques is worth his place for his batting alongside the likes of Marcus Stoinis and Hastings.Khawaja and Handscomb were both part of the ODI team over the summer, and the latter’s performance with the bat suffered notably when asked to keep wicket in New Zealand in place of the injured Matthew Wade.Chris Lynn, who injured his shoulder in the IPL this week, and Mitchell Starc have been chosen subject to fitness assessments, meaning Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Pattinson all appear in a pace-laden squad six months out from a home Ashes series.Trevor Hohns, the chairman of the selection panel, said Australia’s medical staff would monitor the fitness of Lynn and Starc – who has been out of action since he flew home halfway through Australia’s Test series in India with a stress fracture in his right foot – and hoped both would be fit by the time the team departed on May 18.Pattinson, who last played an ODI in September 2015, has been in roaring form since his return from a long-term injury, taking 24 wickets at 17.41 for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield and carrying that form into the County Championship for Nottinghamshire, taking 13 wickets in two matches at 12.92. His inclusion gives Australia a wealth of genuine pace options, with Hastings’ return a nod to early English summer conditions.”Both James and John have made very good returns from injury and are bowling well for their respective teams in the English County competition as well as both contributing well with the bat,” Hohns said.”When you also add Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins to the fast bowling artillery it becomes a very exciting proposition for Australian cricket.”ESPNcricinfo Ltd

Henriques has been an irregular member of Australia’s ODI squad, playing only eight matches between his debut in 2009 and his last match in August 2016. He has scored 46 runs at 6.57 and taken six wickets with his medium-pace at 40.83.Faulkner has greater ODI experience – 67 matches, with averages of 34.06 and 30.08 with bat and ball – and was Player of the Match in the final of the 2015 World Cup. Since then, while his left-arm seam has remained an effective weapon, his batting returns have fallen away, with his last 17 innings yielding a high score of 36 and an average of 17.40.It is also possible that a lack of recent match practice has gone against Faulkner, who has not featured in a competitive game since playing for Tasmania against Queensland in the Sheffield Shield in early March. He is yet to play a match for his IPL team, Gujarat Lions, this season. Henriques, on the other hand, has featured in all but one of Sunrisers Hyderabad’s six matches, scoring 138 runs at an average of 46.00 and a strike rate of 127.77, and taking one wicket in 10 overs.”Moises finished off the domestic season very well and has had a great start in the Indian Premier League,” Hohns said. “We believe Moises’ batting has improved significantly in the past six months and he will provide us with a strong option should he be selected.”James has been a consistent performer for the one-day squad for several years, however with players such as Pattinson, Cummins and Hastings coming back to full fitness and the emergence of Marcus Stoinis, James was squeezed out of the squad and an unlucky omission.”Stoinis and Hastings are the two other seam-bowling allrounders in Australia’s squad, with Glenn Maxwell and Travis Head providing part-time offspin back-up to Adam Zampa’s legspin.

Pat Cummins is flying through a dust cloud. The ball is close enough that he can reach it but high enough he has to reach out. Legs and arms go in all directions as his body jumps towards where he thinks the ball will be. But he miscalculates and now has to change his position in mid-air.Cummins launches himself so far that when he finally lands – chest first, face in the dirt – he is on the adjacent pitch. He is a bit dazed as he gets up but makes sure to ask about the lbw. The appeal is unsuccessful, but it is all thrilling.Few in the world fly like Cummins.R Ashwin stands at the other end, safe for now. He had been set up brilliantly and the ball that was meant to trap him had everything. It had reverse swing, it was fast – as Cummins has been all day – and the events that followed showed off Cummins’ athleticism. Few bowlers in world cricket could react as well in their follow-throughs as he did.There was the pointless appeal, which has been the soundtrack of the day. It showed desperation, which Cummins has never had problems showing. When he hit the ground, he was disappointed he could not take the catch.The rest of Australia just hoped he got up again.*****Cummins knew he was getting quick when his older brothers weren’t keen to play him in the backyard. But as rapid they thought he was, his rise as a professional cricketer was faster. In March 2010, Cummins was a second grade player for Penrith. By October 2011, he was in an Australian team.In between, he had only played three first-class matches, the last of which was the Sheffield Shield final when he was tormented by Ed Cowan. The Tasmania opener kept telling the tearaway quick he was getting slower with each spell and mocked him for being unable to take the wicket his New South Wales team needed. So Cummins, playing the most important match of his career, growing ever more desperate to dismiss Cowan, pushed himself as hard as he could.He bowled like the wind for 65 overs in the match. He was 17 years old.An 18-year old Pat Cummins was tough even for a Test legend like Jacques Kallis•AFP

In the second half of Cummins’ 2009-10 grade season, he bowled 89 overs in three months. He spent the off season nursing hot spots in his back. In those three Shield games alone, he bowled 816 deliveries. But between that final six years ago and this Ranchi Test, he only managed 976 more.Nevertheless, it was the lion-hearted performance and the scary pace and not the wickets – Cummins only had nine of them – that convinced the selectors to pick him for the tour of South Africa in 2011.Ryan Harris was injured for the last of two Tests and Cummins was called in for Johannesburg. It was barely a month since he had turned 18. And he was preparing to play the most difficult format of the game with his team 0-1 down and in danger of losing the series.Amid the nerves, the only thing Cummins cared about was making sure his first ball in Test cricket was not like his first ball in T20Is – a half-tracker. He really needn’t have worried so much.With pace, swing and some decent bounce, Cummins became the youngest Australian to pick up a five-wicket haul. And though he struggled in the second innings with a foot injury, he still came back to hit the winning runs. After the game he was sitting and chatting to Dale Steyn for hours. It was a plot straight out of a Teen Wolf film.”It’s one of those things that you’re never going to say,” Cummins said of his debut efforts. “‘I’ve got a sore heel, I’m not going to not bowl just because it’s sore’. I guess it didn’t really affect me too much until that last day. And there it was almost frustrating because I was trying to bowl as fast as I can, and you look up on the screen and it was about, you know, 120k. And you just go, ‘Oh no, what am I doing here?’ And it’s one of those things that’s just frustrating for a bowler to have, but it’s something that you just want to keep bowling through.”But Cummins couldn’t just keep bowling anymore. He had mangled up the bones and tendons in his foot. He was making loads of money. He had a contract with Cricket Australia. He had the best medical care the board could afford. But he was an infrequent player because that one injury became many.A side strain, a back stress-fracture, another back stress-fracture, and then finally a third back-stress fracture. And that was just the greatest hits.Cummins wasn’t 25 yet and he was already in the ‘whatever happened to that guy’ bracket of Test players.Pat Cummins is a natural athlete•Getty Images

If he could show enough fitness to last a day in the field, Australia would rush him back, throw him in, and then immediately send him to the medical centre to keep him safe. Cummins was never fully fit; he was always just pre-injured.When he did come back to international cricket in 2012, despite the hype of his teenage years and spending half his life in an MRI machine, he still excited people. Barney Ronay saw a Cummins spell in an ODI he wasn’t covering and felt moved to write almost as many words on him as Cummins had bowled balls in an Australian shirt.That was Cummins, an occasional spark in cricket fans’ eyes.*****Before he took 5 for 7 to destroy Queensland, James Pattinson had asked the Australian selectors not to pick him as Mitchell Starc’s replacement for this India tour. If Pattinson, Starc, Cummins and Josh Hazlewood were all one man, they would have taken 346 wickets at 26. Of course, if that was one man, he wouldn’t be able to walk with all the injuries.New South Wales captain Moises Henriques was concerned about Cummins being thrown into Test cricket without proper preparation. The fast bowler had played one Shield game, where he picked up eight wickets and was Man of the Match, but could that really make him ready to play international cricket? The jet lag alone would have been troublesome.Even if unlike Pattinson, Cummins felt ready, unlike Starc he was fit, and despite Henriques’ fears, he could get through the game, this was India. His team-mates had trained specifically and thought about little other than this tour for months. Cummins did not have that luxury. The SCG might be the one Australian venue that best mimics Asian conditions but it was still in the wrong country. And he was in the wrong head space.When Cummins finally arrived in India, he went straight to the nets and started working on fast offcutters. The history of fast cutter bowlers in Tests is pretty limited. Some quicks have tried them in India and at best they have had mixed results. Sydney Barnes, the England quick from the 1900s, was probably the last one to be truly brilliant with them (and he called himself a spinner) and Mustafizur Rahman is the latest to try them consistently. But those two practiced every day to get control of it. Almost everyone else who has bowled cutters in Asia – Michael Kasprowicz, Lance Klusener – had time to think and work on them.Cummins arrived on site, toyed with the idea at practice and was trying them in a Test. Predictably some of them went horribly wrong. But then there were those that ripped off the pitch like the spawn of Satan.It was a cutter that gave Pat Cummins his first Test wicket in five years•Associated Press

Cummins’ pace and accuracy, which was better than Starc’s, meant India could never get on top of him. He had already almost clipped KL Rahul with a very quick bouncer but it took a cutter to dismiss the batsman, a cutter that was like a heat-seeking missile with a personal grudge against its target.In the first session on Saturday, it seemed like India were just trying to keep Cummins out. He had not even been in the squad a week ago. Now he had become the main threat. As the day wore on, it seemed like the entire Australian bowling was his support staff. Their job was to keep things tidy so he could rip the batsmen out at the other end. And if one of his team-mates took a wicket, he was recalled into the attack to greet the new man in.Cummins took out Virat Kohli with one that swung away a bit and bounced more than expected. It was the sort of delivery that real fast bowlers get wickets with: it didn’t look unplayable, but if you were facing it wasn’t easy. Ajinkya Rahane’s wicket was pure pace. A bouncer gone wrong, a batsman making a rash decision to try and reach it and a keeper finishing the catch.Those might not have looked like great balls, but he had bowled plenty of them to make India feel like they had to play such wild shots. He deserved his four wickets, simply for putting all that time in the gym and in rehab, and now in the middle making quality batsmen feel uncomfortable.*****Cummins was flying. His slower deliveries were faster than most bowlers’ fastest deliveries and by the time he dropped that caught-and-bowled chance off Ashwin, he had taken wickets with cutters, new-ball swing and sheer pace. Eventually he added reverse to his armoury.Ashwin had to face all of that – Australia had forced him to with canny leg-side fields to Pujara – and all he could do was hope for the best. In total Ashwin faced 22 balls, 20 of which had come from Cummins. When the last one came it was similar to the Rahul ball, a cutter that leapt up and at him, and his only reprieve was from the umpire.Cummins got a small crack at Wriddhiman Saha before a bye let Cheteshwar Pujara take the strike back. He tried one full over at Pujara, ending it with an ordinary offcutter, and when he made his way back to his fielding position he looked broken. He was bent over at the waist, taking deep breaths. When he had to change positions, he moved slowly, like there was something not quite right. If it wasn’t a limp, it was a very sore walk.Cummins barely came in with the bowler when the last few balls of the day were bowled. He should have come off the field, but that’s not his way. As he did for New South Wales in the Shield final and Australia in his first Test, he gave every single part of himself for his team. Hopefully this time, there is something left.Five years ago, Cummins’ dream was “to be part of a winning Australian side consistently.” All Australian cricket has ever wanted is to have him play consistently.On Saturday, in conditions not made for him, on a tour he was not supposed to be on, in only his tenth first-class match, he was flying. The problem for him has never been the flying; it’s been the frequent crash landing at the end.

ScorecardFile photo – Sam Rainbird picked up 4 for 50•Getty Images

South Australia made a stuttering start against Tasmania at Bellerive Oval in a match the Redbacks must win outright to be in contention for the Sheffield Shield final.Sent in by the Tigers captain George Bailey on an evenly-grassed Hobart surface, no South Australia batsman passed 50 and it took a steadying, unbeaten 46 from the wicketkeeper Alex Carey to push the visitors as far as 225. Sam Rainbird claimed four wickets for the Tigers, who are out of contention at the bottom of the Shield table.Tasmania’s pursuit was punctuated by a trio of wickets before the close, two for Chadd Sayers and one for Daniel Worrall. Tasmania finished the day at 3 for 76, with Bailey unbeaten on 22.