Sri Lanka batting coach Hashan Tillakaratne disregards 4-day Tests

Hashan Tillakaratne Getty Images

Cricket South Africa (CSA) have scheduled a four-day contest against Zimbabwe on Boxing Day. Faf du Plessis and Dean Elgar, however, have opposed to the concept and instead back the traditional 5-day Tests. Even MCC, on Wednesday, backed the original model, adding more to the fire.

Now Sri Lanka s batting coach Hashan Tillakaratne has expressed his reservations. Tillakaratne believes that the idea of day-night Tests should remain.

Five days of proper Test match cricket tests your skills. We should stick to five-day Test matches. What we saw in Abu Dhabi earlier this week was proper Test match cricket where the result came only on the final session of the last day. I am not a fan of deviating from five-day Test cricket, Tillakaratne told the reporters ahead of Sri Lanka's first day-night Test which they will be playing against Pakistan.

Tillakaratne said that pink-ball cricket will provide a different experience to all the teams. Sri Lanka themselves are eagerly waiting to get a hold of the pink ball, It is something new for us, but we are eagerly looking forward for the challenge. We are well prepared for the pink ball challenge. Our training today was with the pink ball and tomorrow we will train with the pink ball under lights.

The pink ball I believe behaves differently according to conditions. When we trained in Colombo under lights it moved a little bit. Here we have to wait and see. I saw some footage of last year's West Indies versus Pakistan game here and the ball didn't move about much and it was as good batting track, Tillakaratne added.