Future is bright for Sri Lanka says Mahela

Wednesday, 13 July 2011 00:20 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

In his final exclusive columns at espncricinfo.com, master batsman Mahela Jaywardene looks back on the recent tour. Here are some excerpts

WE came to England with high hopes for the one-day series so it was a huge disappointment to lose 3-2.

I thought we played some very good cricket but we had a couple of really poor games as well.

Old Trafford was the closest match of the series and unfortunately we couldn’t do quite enough to get over the line.

It wasn’t a polished performance from us and there are a lot of areas to improve on. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We showed our fighting spirit and almost pulled the game around at the end.

It’s actually quite frustrating looking back on the tour and thinking how good it could have been.

We lost the Test series because of one session in Cardiff and in the one-day series it was down to a couple of batting collapses at crucial moments.

We can’t be too disappointed because we played some really good cricket and weren’t outplayed for long periods of time.

Hopefully the young players will have learned from their experiences in England.

It was definitely a missed opportunity not to make the most of an Old Trafford wicket that suited our style of cricket.

But you still have to play a good game of cricket and we made an awful start by giving away too many runs in the first 10 overs.

It was always going to be tough for us to come back from that.

However, England were looking at getting 350 and we managed to haul them back brilliantly which was a great effort. But we lost the match in the first 10 overs. Despite chasing hard we made too many mistakes.

Our performance at Old Trafford really summed up one of our major problems on the tour when we lost three early wickets in the run-chase and it’s something we need to put right.

However, on this occasion we felt we had to go quite hard against the new ball so that it was more comfortable for the boys coming in lower down the order.

It was always going to be much harder for them to score at seven or eight an over.

Angelo Mathews batted really well while Jeevan Mendis and Dinesh Chandimal played superbly and Kumar Sangakkara helped give us a base from where we almost managed to get the total.

There is plenty of room to improve but there are promising signs for the future.

(The Sun)