Sanath Jayasuriya took two bold gambles today. With the first - winning the toss and electing to bowl - he seemed to have graciously gifted India a head start in the series. With the other - opting for the second new ball - he wrested control right back. The match is far from over, and Jayasuriya will know he has sacrificed his biggest weapon, Muttiah Muralitharan in the fourth innings. But Sourav Ganguly will know that India let him off the hook. Jayasuriya arrived for the toss with a thick bandage tucked behind his right ear. It concealed a mere bruise sustained at practice, not the coach's rolling instructions via radio like we have once seen in the past. He liked what he saw and chose to bowl. Four quicks, greentop, cloud cover ... he rubbed his hands and smiled. O perfect day!

India wondered how they might combat this green monster. Painfully for the paying spectator, they did it by letting the ball well alone. Sri Lanka committed the greater sin by allowing them to do so. The first session was an anti-climactic battle of not seizing the initiative. The pitch afforded bounce, but it was slow, spongy bounce. Chaminda Vaas and Dilhara Fernando exploited it, but to little effect.

They soon found out that green is just a colour in Galle. Local word has it that the proximity of the ground to the beach (it's only about 200 yards away) means the pitch is always sandy underneath. Jayasuriya himself took four wickets in each innings in the last Test here against England, and Muralitharan mananged seven for the match.

Murali slipped into an outstanding spell after lunch and found the pitch breaking up into puffs of dust. From the promise of a bloody contest on a marble top, it slowly turned into the familiar subcontinental cat-and-mouse game. Sadagopan Ramesh and Shiv Sunder Das scored off whatever drifted onto their pads, and both passed 40. For the rest of the time they kept Murali and Ruchira Perera out.

Ramesh's airy drive to extra cover was as much a result of Murali's teasing length as his own increasingly worrying habit of losing the plot halfway. Vaas, meawhile, realised that he's best not trying to be Brett Schultz and pegged away at the off stump, eventually forcing Das into edging to slip.

By evening Murali was turning it alarmingly, going repeatedly past Ganguly's bat - and even first slip on a couple of occasions - so nothing explains why Jayasuriya took the second new ball. But he did anyway, and Fernando, hostile but dense in the morning, promptly got him two wickets. Mohammad Kaif and Hemang Badani are hardly big names, but their wickets could prove to be extremely big ones for Sri Lanka.

Rahul Bhattacharya is a staff writer for Wisden Online India

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