Sri Lanka crush Australia

Needless to be said, Australia have never taken the T20 format of cricket seriously whatsoever. This was evident first when they lost their super eights match to Pakistan in the inaugural edition of the world T20 followed by a loss to India in the semi finals. If that was not enough, Australia failed to make it to the super eights of the world T20 two years later in England when they lost their qualifier match to West Indies and Sri Lanka. However, in the third edition of the world T20, they reached the finals of the tournament without losing even a single game en route.

Still, their T20 record is not convincing when in most of the cases they are found putting a better performance in the other two formats of the game and failing miserably in T20 games. However, in yesterday's game against Sri Lanka they were once again never in the game when they allowed the hosts to put up 198 on the board which can hardly be chased down successfully. The Aussie bowlers could get only three batsmen out from Sri Lanka out of which Chandimal was out hit-wicket. One interesting aspect from Aussie bowling was that whoever bowled their quota of 4 overs returned with a wicket.

Brett Lee, Mitchell Johnson and Shane Watson bowled their quota of 4 overs and returned with wickets of Mahela Jayawardane, Dinesh Chandimal and Kumara Sangakkara respectively. Looking at the batting chart of Australia, they had absolutely no answers to the Sri Lankan bowlers when no one could support David Warner who had a great going. Watson was dismissed early and that was followed by Shaun Marsh, David Hussey and Cameron White who got out scoring single digit scores. Huge hits were seen towards the end of the Aussie innings when Mitchell Johnson and Steve D'Keefe went in for the kill.

But, that was because the Sri Lankan bowlers let them loose when their win was confirmed. Likewise, similar to the Aussie bowling, bowlers who bowled their complete quota of 4 overs were the highest wicket takers in the Australian batting innings. Kulashekara and Perera returned with figures of 4-0-39-2 and 4-0-26-3 respectively. However, Lakmal and Herath also returned with a wicket but didn't bowl their quota completely and were not among the top bowlers from Sri Lanka. Had the Sri Lankan bowlers not let the tail-end batsmen loose, the Aussie score would not have crossed 150. In the end, Aussies say that "T20 cricket is not for us".