Sri Lanka coach Mickey Arthur lambasts batsmen for horrible series loss against England

Sri Lanka head coach Mickey Arthur has lamented the poor shot selection by batsmen and their wrong approach as reasons behind the second and final match of the series that went horribly wrong for the hosts. Arthur said that an all-out approach that the batsmen took on the fourth day of the Test was not discussed and rather the team had charted a strategy to bat time.

"We fought and fought and fought for three days and got ourselves in a really good position, and in two hours we proceeded to throw it away. It was poor batting. It's something I'm going to sit and talk with the players about now. When we lead the game, we've got to be able to put our foot on the neck of the opposition and we didn't do that. That today just wasn't good enough. We've got to learn to be ruthless,” Arthur said.

"That was nowhere near our gameplan. Our gameplan this morning was to absorb pressure, grind away, and grind out a couple of sessions to make sure that we got ourselves into a very good position to push for the win tomorrow. That was our strategy. We had a long chat about that this morning. We used the blueprint of our second innings in the first Test match as something that we wanted to base our innings on. Somewhere it's gone horribly wrong. That's something I'm going to dig up and find tonight."

Arthur acknowledged that these collapses are occurring very frequently and the series against England was not the first instance when Sri Lanka had wasted all the good efforts made by the bowlers. He added that there will be a round of discussions between him and the team and that the team must find a way to avoid losing games in one session.

"This isn't the first time that it's happened, and it's something I need to look into with the team. We let it slip in one disastrous session. Much like in the first Test when we let slip in the first innings again. We can't afford as a team to have those poor sessions. We've got to get our good and our bad closer together. The game was there for us to take and we didn't take it. Extremely disappointed with that,” Arthur added in his review of the series that ended disastrous for the home side in the form of 0-2 sweep.

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