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Cricket PlayersNot for the first time, Indian spinners swept into submission
Sonal Dinusha's stellar 420 runs against India, including 173 from sweep shots, frustrates their spinners, ending India's series on a low note.
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Mumbai: Sonal Dinusha is not a name the Indian team will forget in a hurry. He was why they left the Sri Lankan shores deflated despite the series win. The southpaw’s crouched stance, long reach and faultless sweeps will linger in memory.
For India, it wasn’t just Dinusha’s persistent presence at the crease - he spent 1139 minutes, faced 722 balls, scored 420 runs with 3 tons - but his methods that would have left them with a sense of deja vu. The left-hander scored 173 runs playing sweeps (conventional and reverse) without being dismissed. That’s the most by anyone in the DRS era, surpassing the 164 runs Joe Root scored in England’s 2021 Sri Lanka tour.
Indian cricket needs no reminding that strong players of the sweep shot have negated their spin strength before. Let’s not go as far back as Graham Gooch in the 1987 World Cup semi-final or Jimmy Adams in the 1994-95 West Indies Test tour of India. Even Andy Flower’s reverse engineering during Zimbabwe’s 2000 Test tour of India and Matthew Hayden’s sweeping masterclass against Indian spin in Australia’s 2001 Test tour occurred in the pre-DRS era.
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More recent examples include Joe Root in the 2021 series in India and Ollie Pope and Ben Duckett during the 2024 series, where they employed sweeps and reverse sweeps liberally on more spin-friendly pitches.
It’s not that Indian spinners carry the psychological baggage of being troubled by sweeping. In Sri Lanka, Ravindra Jadeja was the only survivor from those home series against England. It’s India’s inability to counter a ploy they should have anticipated better that would rankle. Dinusha, with his diminutive stature, employed sweep shots as his primary scoring option in his match saving innings (133*) in Colombo.
In an old Star Sports video, Hayden and Gautam Gambhir (as a TV pundit) discuss a batter’s checklist before employing the sweep shot. Gambhir was asked whether awareness of the nature of the soil was crucial to anticipate the bounce. “Forget the soil, most important is to trust your defense first,” he said.
Dinusha primarily did that to boss the proceedings. Indian captain Shubman Gill too alluded to Dinusha’s “solid defense” that thwarted their spinners’ efforts.
Dinusha’s execution of the sweep shots may have required hours of work behind the scenes. But his game plan was laid out in real time: he swept based not just on the line, but also the length of the spinner. He could do that because the bounce on the Colombo strip on Day 5 was predictable even though spinners were getting the ball to turn.
“It’s hardest (to sweep) when some spin and some don’t. When it’s consistent spin, you can work out when to take it on, and which balls from which line you can take a risk on,” Root said during the 2024 tour of India.
Turn for the spinners became progressively slower at Colombo according to Gill. He felt that took lbw and bowled dismissals out of the equation. This may have also blunted the prospects of India’s most experienced spinner Ravindra Jadeja.
The only way India tried to apply pressure was through close-in fielders, but the spinners couldn’t create enough chances to bring them into play. Sarfaraz Khan with the helmet got all the screen time for his banter, but that wasn’t going to shake Dinusha’s resolve.
Dinusha also had the wits to attack Manav Suthar, India’s best spinner on show, with the reverse sweep in particular. Despite the overspin Suthar imparts, Dinusha had the skills to stay on top of his sweeps. At Galle, Dinusha had attacked Kuldeep Yadav with his slog sweeps. Sarnash Jain, Kuldeep’s replacement in Colombo, could not challenge Dinusha enough.
While the off-spinner got Dinusha caught at slip in the first innings, he couldn’t put together a threatening spell in the second essay. The left-hander frequently scored against the debutant spinner with conventional sweeps to render him ineffective. The craft and guile of R Ashwin was sorely missed.
There’s one stat, though, that sticks out exposing the limitations of India’s bowling attack. Sri Lanka’s lower order (8-11) played out 292 balls to Dinusha’s 264 on Day 4 and 5. India’s bowling attack consisting of five specialist bowlers to Sri Lanka’s four couldn’t trouble the tailenders. Once the young batting star was assured that he could trust the tail, he swept India into misery with every passing over, until the part-time spinners had to be called to complete the mandatory overs.
