Friday, June 7, 2002 Sri Lanka had great expectations for this series, their first full tour of England. But they are in danger of returning home a beaten and forgotten team. Old Trafford offers them a decent chance of salvaging a draw, although the kickabout in Japan and South Korea will do little to make this a memorable series.

Sri Lanka will hope that England's cricketers are distracted by the progress of their counterparts in the Far East, and that Muttiah Muralitharan is somewhere near his best. Old Trafford can do a fair impression of an Asian dustbowl, as Pakistan's cricketers discovered to their advantage last year, and Murali will be the most capable player on either side to exploit it.

Whatever the outcome — and the one-day series is likely to suit Sri Lanka far better — Sanath Jayasuriya's team have some serious questions to ask themselves about their true pedigree in Test cricket. The first of these is about Jayasuriya himself. Sri Lanka are used to a quickfire and sure-handed start from their captain, who in this series has thus far failed to approach the consistency that makes his belligerent batting such a sensation. When a player like Jayasuriya starts losing his eye for the ball, the result can be painfully embarrassing — like an over-the-hill boxer going through his routine, but just too slow and too predictable to land a useful punch.

This inconsistency has exposed Kumar Sangakkara earlier than he would have wished. Unlike Mahela Jayawardene, who has shown his ability, Sangakkara has lived down to his billing as a flat-track bully. With a back-foot-dominated technique and little front-foot movement, Sangakkara looks a sucker for the moving and the rising ball. Jayasuriya may conceivably get his form back, but Sangakkara's technique looks too fundamentally flawed to allow him any significant success outside Asia.

A further crisis for Sri Lanka is that their bowling attack looks impotent without Murali fully fit - doubly so now that Chaminda Vaas has lost his knack of taking vital wickets. This over-reliance on Murali is bad for the development of Sri Lankan cricket, and not much good for Murali himself. The more he bowls the more wickets he takes, but also the more likely he is to be injured.

Murali might well rescue Sri Lanka's tour at Old Trafford, yet their cricket board and management would be deluding themselves if they did not recognise that there are major weaknesses in the current team, despite their lofty status in the international Test rankings. Most worryingly of all, Sri Lanka's lions have lost the roar that Arjuna Ranatunga blessed them with. This is an essential ingredient for any Test side seeking to improve its overseas record. Sanath Jayasuriya may be just too nice to move Sri Lankan cricket up the next rung of the ladder.

Kamran Abbasi, born in Lahore, brought up in Rotherham, is deputy editor of the British Medical Journal.

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