Honours even despite Sehwag century

ndia started promisingly in their quest to exorcise the ghosts of the SSC Test before being thwarted by double-strikes from Ajantha Mendis and Chaminda Vaas. Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir played India into a position of domination but, after a rain break that accounted for the middle session and 75 minutes, Sri Lanka struck gold, taking four wickets for 11, bringing the memories of the collapses in the first Test back to roost.

Like the pitch at the Galle International Stadium, which comprised two polar halves -­ one cracked and unreliable, the other flat and damp -­ the first day's play featured startling contrasts. In the first half of the day Sehwag and Gambhir put behind them not only the debacle at the SSC but also thoughts of how, early in the piece here, they played and missed, and how the ball misbehaved when it hit the cracks. They got India off to a flier; Sehwag fell just short ­- for the second time in his career -­­ of a hundred in the first session of a Test, a session in which India scored 151 runs, registering the second biggest opening stand in Galle.

What made Sehwag and Gambhir's partnership - which came at more than five an over ­- remarkable was that both batsmen were troubled amply by the bowling. Nuwan Kulasekara was the most testing,­ and the most unfortunate, of the bowlers in the first session, getting the ball to move both off the seam and off the cracks. In his first three overs he beat Gambhir and Sehwag more than once each, even getting a leading edge from Gambhir, and used the variable bounce well, bowling shooters and bouncers.

Gambhir was the first to counter the cracks: he stood outside the crease, and then walked down the pitch, almost like Matthew Hayden, as the bowler ran in. The lbw was ruled out, and a game of tip-and-run got underway, with the batsmen taking singles almost intuitively.

Soon Sehwag shook off the early jitters and shifted gears. No bowler was spared: only a soggy outfield saved Ajantha Mendis from being hit for a four in his first over. Muttiah Muralitharan was hit for a four off the first ball he bowled. Mendis was hit for a six for the first time in Tests.

Kulasekara employed a similar field for Sehwag as at the SSC -­ two fielders in the deep on the leg side. Here he bowled a head-high bouncer again, and Sehwag went for the pull again, but this time he got on top and hit it to cow corner. This was a batsman who reached a triple-century with a six, after he had tried -­­ and failed -­­ to get to a double the same way. Sehwag was true to character in his approach to moving from 90 to 100. The first ball he faced after the break, he edged Vaas to gully, who collected it first bounce. The second ball, he moved his front leg out of the way and almost hit it into the Galle Fort. Two balls later he bludgeoned a straight boundary to get to his 15th century.