SL vs IND, 2nd Test — Day 4 Stumps: Sri Lanka 229/6 Following On, Lead by 16, Sooriyabandara Stumped on 92

Fourteen runs. That is the entire distance between the Test Sri Lanka played on Wednesday and the one they would have preferred. They resumed on 265 for 8 needing 39 to avoid the follow-on, added 25, and were bowled out for 290 — which meant that instead of watching India bat, they spent the afternoon batting again, on the same surface, against the same five bowlers, with the same deficit hanging over them and one fewer day to survive it.

And yet by the time the rain arrived at 72.4 overs of the second innings, the scoreboard read 229 for 6 and Sri Lanka were sixteen runs in front. Not comfortable. Not safe. But in front, which on Tuesday morning would have sounded like a joke. The follow-on is a strange instrument: it is designed to end a match early, and every so often it hands the trailing side the one thing they cannot otherwise buy, which is time spent in the middle finding out that they can play.

The morning belonged to Sonal Dinusha, and briefly it belonged to him completely. He came out on 85 with Lahiru Kumara for company and a No. 11 to follow, and he did the thing that separates a promising innings from a permanent one — he took the strike, farmed it, and got there. The hundred came from 147 balls with eight fours and three sixes, and it made him the second Sri Lankan after Duleep Mendis to score hundreds in his first two Tests against India. Kumara's contribution to the ninth-wicket stand of 50 was eight runs from most of a session; that partnership took 105 balls, and neither man will care that only one of them scored in it.

Dinusha fell soon after, caught by KL Rahul off Saransh Jain — the debutant's second wicket in Test cricket, both of them taken on the same morning after two earlier appeals had been overturned on review. Sri Lanka 290. India 503 for 9 declared. A lead of 213, four sessions remaining, a surface with three days of wear in it and a forecast full of rain. Shubman Gill did not need long to decide.

The follow-on began exactly the way the first innings had. Mohammed Siraj found Lahiru Udara's edge inside four overs and Sri Lanka were 5 for 1, and the pattern that has defined this series — top-order wicket, immediate scoreboard pressure, the middle order arriving before the shine has gone — was reasserting itself before anybody had settled into their seats.

Then Kamil Mishara and Pasindu Sooriyabandara did something Sri Lanka have not done all series: they attacked the spinners rather than surviving them. The pair put on 58 in 62 balls, sweeping and reverse-sweeping with a freedom that looked closer to recklessness than method until you noticed how few of the shots went in the air. Mishara made 32 from 39 before Ravindra Jadeja pinned him in front — the sweep is a percentage shot, and the percentage eventually collects.

What followed was the best partnership of Sri Lanka's series. Sooriyabandara and Kamindu Mendis added 115 for the third wicket, 100 of them in 156 balls, and for two hours either side of lunch the lead of 213 stopped looking like a wall and started looking like arithmetic. Kamindu reached fifty from 87 balls with three sixes, all of them straight, all of them against spin, all of them the product of a batter who had decided that a man on the drive is a man not on the boundary. He was out for 55 when Shubman Gill flung himself low at square leg off Prasidh Krishna — a captain's catch in the literal sense, taken at the moment the match was closest to slipping.

Sooriyabandara's day deserves its own paragraph, and probably its own sympathy. He made 80 in the first innings and 92 in the second. He has now spent 306 balls at the crease across two innings of his second Test match, faced the best attack he will meet for some time, and been dismissed twice within twenty runs of a hundred. Eighty and ninety-two. In the ledger they are two very good scores. In the memory they will be the two afternoons he did everything right except finish.

The dismissal was not a failure of concentration so much as a failure of length-reading. He charged Manav Suthar, looking to hit through the line and get the field pushed back, and Suthar simply took the pace off. The ball dipped, dropped short of the swing, and Rishabh Pant — back behind the stumps for this innings after Dhruv Jurel had kept for 83.4 overs of the first — completed the stumping before Sooriyabandara had begun to think about turning. Sri Lanka 212 for 5. From 178 for 2 they had lost four wickets for 40, and the sixteen-run lead they eventually reached is what was salvaged from that hour rather than built on it.

India's bowling in the second innings was notable mostly for its patience. Suthar bowled 18 overs and went for 81, which is expensive by Test standards and irrelevant by the standards of a bowler whose job on day four is to buy wickets. Jadeja gave 48 from 18. Jain, in his first Test, sent down 17.4 overs and got Niroshan Dickwella lbw. The figures that stand out belong to Siraj: nine overs, four maidens, eleven runs, one wicket. On a surface where the ball has not moved for two days, that is a fast bowler doing the unglamorous half of the job — squeezing an end shut so that the spinners can attack the other.

The one thing India did not get was the second new ball. It was two overs away when the rain came, and the difference between taking it at 72.4 overs on day four and taking it at the start of day five is the difference between four wickets tonight and four wickets tomorrow. Sri Lanka will not have minded the weather. They have not minded it once this week.

CricIntel's day-three report said that the 39 runs Sri Lanka needed to avoid the follow-on were, on the evidence of Tuesday, entirely gettable provided Dinusha kept the strike. He kept the strike, he got his hundred, and they still finished fourteen short — a call we got wrong, and wrong in the direction that mattered most, because it was the follow-on that shaped everything after lunch. We were right that Dinusha would reach three figures and right that Sooriyabandara was the more complete player than a second-Test average suggests. We also wrote that Gill had a decision to make about enforcing; on a two-day forecast and a 213-run lead, it turned out not to be much of one.

Day five, then, and the cleanest equation of the match. India need four wickets with a new ball due immediately and a maximum of 90 overs to take them in. Sri Lanka need to bat those overs, or enough of them that whatever India are left chasing is either notional or unreachable in the time left. Sonal Dinusha is 7 not out from 37 balls and has already made 103 and 85 in this match; Keshara Nuwantha has faced 29 balls for 3, which for a No. 8 with a Test to save is precisely the right kind of number. Behind both of them sit Prabath Jayasuriya, Lahiru Kumara and Asitha Fernando — and a rain radar that has intervened on three consecutive days. India lead the series 1-0 and cannot lose it. What they can lose, if Thursday goes the way the last three afternoons have gone, is the clean sweep that has looked inevitable since the first hour of the first Test.