Olly Stone spoke of England’s frustration after a dark day in south London in which they were forced to bowl only spin in the final session and surrendered a commanding position in the third Test. After tea, with England’s seamers mothballed, Sri Lanka eased from 142 for five to 211 without further loss, whittling the first-innings deficit down to 114.
“They’re the rules, aren’t they? You can’t change those,” Stone said. “It’s taken out of our hands. We’d have obviously loved to have bowled seam there. It’s just one of those things that’s frustrating but has to be done.”
The laws of the game state that “it is solely for the umpires together to decide whether … light means it would be dangerous or unreasonable for play to take place”. But they add that “conditions shall not be regarded as either dangerous or unreasonable merely because they are not ideal”.
Asked if it was so dark that seam bowling was actively dangerous or if it was simply not ideal, Stone said: “Everyone could see the ball, I guess. As a team we want to be out there for as long as we can and you have to go off what the umpires say, and unfortunately we couldn’t bowl seam. I guess there’s a point where it may become dangerous, and you don’t want to see anyone get hurt. We’ll keep providing the entertainment whether it be with seam or spin, and trying to take the game forward.”
Stone took two for 28 and was involved in a run-out during the part of the afternoon when England’s seamers were let off the leash. At one point Chris Woakes was forced to bowl four balls of spin after the umpires decided two deliveries into an over that it was too dark for him to continue at full pace. “It’s a tricky one where we wanted to stay out there and that was the option to do so,” Stone said.
In the morning England collapsed from 261 for three to 325 all out, with batters repeatedly punished for taking on risky shots. “We always say about taking the positive option and on a different day we miss the fielders, it goes to the boundary, the score creeps up and you take that into your bowling innings really on the front foot,” said Stone.
Those cheap wickets and an unbroken 118-run partnership between Dhananjaya de Silva and Kamindu Mendis allowed Sanath Jayasuriya, Sri Lanka’s head coach, to declare it his side’s best day of the series. “The thing is we bowled really well in the morning,” he said. “We realised what went wrong yesterday – we missed the length, and the line a little bit, and we corrected ourselves. We discussed what went wrong and the good thing was they came back and they did well.”
