Mahela Jayawardene not wary of a full strength Australian side

Mahela Jayawardene not wary of a full strength Australian side

Sri Lanka’s skipper Mahela Jayawardene has said that his team is not worried about the fact that Australia will come at them with full strength in the third One Day International of the five match series.

The Kangaroos were without the services of their regular captain Michael Clarke and several other senior players in the second ODI of the series and suffered a humiliating defeat at the end of the day.

Clarke was not available for the first game too, as he was recovering from a hamstring problem. He developed that problem during the Test series, so he was rested for some time before coming back to action once again.

Despite his absence, Australia managed to win the first ODI comfortably. They did not allow the opposition to settle in and ended up in a comfortable position. However, they failed to carry on the similar momentum in the next game and allowed the tourists
to level the series 1-1.

Jayawardene admits that his team was below par during the first match, but claims that all the homework has been done. He was confident that things will continuously improve for Sri Lanka in the remaining half of the series.

He said, “In Melbourne, we were not up to standard. Especially with the ball – we bowled too many four balls. In Adelaide we had a bit more help from the surface and we bowled good areas and created opportunities. If we can keep up that pressure with the
spinners we have and the allrounders, we have a well-balanced side. Even though we are missing players through injury, and are fiddling around a little with our line-up, we’re pretty comfortable.”

The tourists have been struggling with the fitness of their players, especially the wicketkeepers. They have brought in four different people for this role, but Dinesh Chandimal was probably the biggest loss they suffered because of injury.

However, the Sri Lankan skipper said, “We haven’t decided on an XI because we want to give Dinesh another 24 hours to see how he pulls up. He did bat yesterday and had a few run-throughs, and he pulled up pretty well. We just wanted to give him a little
more time.”

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Posted by Waqar Masood on Jan 17 2013. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry