When the dust settles on the Sri Lanka series, what will stand out for England is that they based their strategy on picking three spinners of contrasting, if somewhat mercurial, talents and ultimately it paid off. Very rarely in their history have they relied quite so heavily on spin as they did here but it delivered the decisive victories in Galle and Kandy, and again put them in the dominant position in Colombo. Moeen Ali, Jack Leach and Adil Rashid are not world-beaters. Each of them got their lines and lengths wrong on occasion and Sri Lanka made them sweat at times, as they did on the fourth day of the Colombo Test, when an England victory appeared a formality at the start of the…

Source: The Times November 26, 2018 09:00 UTC