Sri Lanka salvage draw in Delhi Test; Lose series 1-0

A herculean effort from Dhananjaya DeSilva backed up by some gritty batting by the Sri Lankans helped the hosts salvage the Delhi test against India. Continuing with 3 wickets down from late last evening, Sri Lanka had their backs against the wall before DeSilva dug in to score a determined century and deny India another win over the islanders.

Skipper Dinesh Chandimal continued with his solid form and Dhananjaya de Silva braved the storm well to stitch together an unbeaten 84-run stand, taking Sri Lanka’s total to 119 for 4, still 291 runs behind. While Chandimal was unbeaten on 27, de Silva was oozing confidence, having accumulated 72.

Jadeja’s no-ball problems come back to haunt him

Ishant Sharma and Ravindra Jadeja started off the proceedings but there was not much help for the seamer, given the conditions were the brightest of all days with no haze in the atmosphere. The sun beat down hard on the surface as Ishant struggled to find any movement. Jadeja kept working different angles and was at the batsmen all the time, forcing them to play. As a part of the ploy, he finally got one to spin sharply from a similar length he had been pursuing and Mathews ended up jabbing at it and edging it to Ajinkya Rahane at first slip. Sri Lanka had lost one wicket for just four runs on the morning. While the onfield umpire didn’t check for the no-ball with the TV umpire, replays in the following over clearly showed the left-arm spinner overstepping.

With this 1-0 series win over Sri Lanka, Virat Kohli joined Ricky Ponting as skipper with most consecutive test series (9) wins.