ENG vs SL : Sri Lanka Look To Get Back To Winning Ways In 2nd Test Match Against England

The England National Cricket Team and Sri Lanka National Cricket Team meet in the second match of the three-game Test series. The England (ENG)  vs Sri Lanka(SL)  2nd Test 2024 match takes place at the iconic Lord’s Cricket Ground in London on August 29, Thursday. The England  team suffered a big blow as Mark Wood has been ruled out due to injury. But they have replaced him with Olly Stone in the playing XI. On the other hand, Sri Lanka need a serious performance from the team to avoid yet another series defeat.

The first Test between England and Sri Lanka ended in England’s favour as they registered a hard-fought win by five wickets in a tricky chase. But they have a 1-0 lead now, and they will eye a series win at Lord’s.

ENG vs SL : Previous Performances

England won the series opener by five wickets and took a 1-0 lead. Sri Lanka, however, did well to fight and, at one stage, looked threatening to take the game away from the home side. With WTC points and series on the line, the upcoming contest marks a must-win one for the visiting Sri Lankan team.

At one point in the opening Test at Old Trafford, England were on course for a routine win. Not many gave Sri Lanka a chance when the series got underway. And on expected lines, the island nation were put under the pump after they conceded a lead of 122. By the time they could surpass it, they had already lost four wickets. However, they came up with an excellent comeback from thereon with both bat and ball to stretch England right till the end.

They would hope to draw some confidence from that finish at Old Trafford in their bid to pull one back. Kamindu Mendis was excellent once again as his stocks continued to rise. Debutant Milan Ratnayake was a surprise package as well. If senior players like Dinesh Chandimal, Angelo Mathews and Dimuth Karunaratne can chip in, the visitors can give a good account of themselves. Sri Lanka will also be happy with the fact that they won’t be facing Mark Wood after the pacer suffered an injury.

ENG vs SL : Head to Head

England and Sri Lanka had faced each other till date in 37 matches with England having an upper hand in 18 matches as compared to Sri Lanka’s 8 matches.

• Total Matches: 37
• England: 18
• Sri Lanka: 8
• Draw: 11

ENG vs SL : Pitch Report

The pitch at Lord’s is expected to be seamer-friendly. As there is a good amount of bounce and seam with the new ball. The curator generally offers a green top in tests, which increases the interest of the pacers from both sides. The Lord’s Cricket Ground in London will be expected to provide considerable assistance to fast bowlers. Batters will have to see off the new-ball threat in a bid to entertain chances of playing a long innings. The captain winning the toss will likely opt to bat first, considering the overall track record of the venue.

The pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground is expected to provide significant assistance to fast bowlers early in the match, especially with the new ball. However, as the summer progresses, the pitch is likely to become more batting-friendly, offering batsmen more opportunities to score runs.

If the weather remains dry and sunny, the pitch may deteriorate further, bringing spinners into play. Overall, Lord’s is known for producing balanced contests between bat and ball, offering a challenging yet rewarding experience for both sides.

The weather is set fair, and Lord’s in the sunshine can be tough place for a bowler. There have been some formidable snore-draws in the County Championship this summer, with Middlesex passing 600 twice and 550 once and Glamorgan’s Sam Northeast surpassing Graham Gooch’s 333 as the highest individual scorer at the venue.

That said, West Indies didn’t detain England’s bowlers for long in their visit in July, thanks to Gus Atkinson’s 12 wickets on debut. Pope noted that the pitch had a grassy tinge to it on the eve of the match, but expected to play pretty slow while the sun was out. Clear skies are expected during the course of the Test match. While Sri Lanka would hope for a drier surface, the fast bowlers had a great outing here last month when England hosted West Indies.

ENG VS SL : Big Picture : Sunny weather, sunny times as Sri Lanka finds solace at home away from home

Is there a danger that a competitive Test series might break out in London over the coming fortnight. This is a city where Sri Lanka, remarkably, have not lost a single Test in six visits since August 1991. Admittedly, five of those have been draws at Lord’s, although next week’s return to The Oval for the first time since Murali’s match in 1998 will be a reminder that one of the more disparaged of touring teams have long had the ability to confound expectations on their infrequent England visits.

Which is, to a greater or lesser extent, what Sri Lanka managed to do over the course of four improbably competitive days at Emirates Old Trafford. England eventually landed their fourth Test win out of four this summer, but not before they’d been made to struggle for the upper hand with ball and, latterly, bat, as Joe Root dropped anchor in a distinctly unBazballian 62 not out from 128 balls to oversee a taxing 205-run chase.

The subplots along the way were many and varied. What might have happened on the first evening, for instance, if England hadn’t bowed to the umpires’ assertion that it was too dark to bowl their quicks, and simply gone off for bad light instead of offering Milan Ratnayake 12 overs of spin in which to move towards the highest score by a No.9 on Test debut.

Conversely, what might have happened had England not managed to wrangle a ball-change after 41 overs of Sri Lanka’s second innings, by which stage Angelo Mathews was channelling his 2014 glory days while Kamindu Mendis was on course for his third Test hundred in the space of four calmly authoritative Test appearances

As had been the case in the Oval Ashes Test 12 months earlier, England had made their bed and deserved to have to sleep in it with their treatment of their original ball. They had sacrificed new-ball swing in the quest for a scuffed-up surface and some of the prodigious reverse that Asitha Fernando in particular had harvested.

And even if their replacement ball was the same age as the original, it was like comparing a 41-year-old Hollywood actress with a vagrant who’s lived his adult life in a ditch. Dhananjaya de Silva, Sri Lanka’s captain, confirmed he had spoken to the match referee about the ball-change after the Test, and with such issues an increasingly frequent aspect of the English Test summer, this is clearly a loophole that deserves to be tightened up for future engagements.

All things being equal, however, it was hard to argue that Sri Lanka were robbed in the course of the first Test. Few sides that struggle to 6 for 3 in the first innings, then 1 for 2 in the second, can expect to get away unpunished, although seeing as one of the reasons for those scorelines was a notably fallow display from the otherwise sturdy Dimuth Karunaratne, who averages a tick below 41 in his 92 Tests, and who made 87 runs for once out on his last trip to Lord’s in 2016, there is reason to believe that history won’t repeat itself this week.

For starters, the team as a whole are now better acquainted with English conditions. Their preparation prior to the Old Trafford Test had been a low-key warm-up against England Lions in Worcester, which unsurprisingly proved insufficient to get them fully up to speed.

And, after an intermittently damp experience in Manchester, the weather for London over the coming few days should be distinctly sunnier. There is no proven correlation between warm weather and heightened Sri Lankan performances, but anecdotal evidence from the past 40 years would tend to back up the suspicion that they tend to like it hot.

Either way, Sri Lanka have been granted the window in the calendar that they have been crying out for since their first forays to England in the 1980s. Here we are, in the thick of a full Test series at the sharp end of the English summer, as opposed to a one-off afterthought, as was the case from 1984 to 1998, or an early-season trial by seam and swing, as per 2002 onwards. The onus is on the class of 2024 to live up to the billing they’ve been afforded. And in spite of most expectations, that’s more or less what they managed in the first match of three.

ENG vs SL : In the Spotlight : Ollie Pope and Asitha Fernando

Ollie Pope has made a winning start to his Test captaincy career, which is not to be sniffed at – many great leaders, including his England predecessor, didn’t manage that feat. But when it comes to his day job as England’s No.3, Pope’s main challenge is compartmentalization, and two glaringly sub-par performances reinforced the sense that his game isn’t quite where he wants or needs it to be.

In the first innings he was bowled neck-and-crop by an admittedly excellent ball from Asitha; but in the second, his tendency towards skittishness in the early stages of an innings resulted in an ill-conceived reverse-sweep to slip – the very same shot that underpinned his GOAT-contender innings at Hyderabad in the winter.

On the face of it, he’s still in credit this summer, with 251 runs at 41.83 after four Tests. However, there’s been something intangibly unsettled about his batting post-Hyderabad. Whether it’s a mindset or technical issue, only he can truly say, but he won’t get a chance to focus fully on a remedy in his current stand-in role.

Asitha Fernando was phenomenally good at Old Trafford. He led the line for Sri Lanka in each innings, easing past 50 Test wickets in the space of 15 Tests as he mixed conventional seam and swing with prodigious amounts of reverse – which in itself was quite the feat given how lush the outfield had been all match long.

His challenge now is to back that performance up at Lord’s (and The Oval) in the coming days. England will no doubt be better prepared for his unassuming threat, having had a good sighting of his probing methods, but Aqib Javed, Sri Lanka’s bowling coach, likened his effortless each-way movement to that of Pakistan’s Mohammad Asif, and for Test cricket’s connoisseurs, there really is no higher praise. Just ask Kevin Pietersen. If he can keep England guessing with new ball and old, so much the better for Sri Lanka’s hopes of keeping the series alive.

ENG vs SL : Vital Stats that matters