Aussies mauled in Galle as Sri Lanka claim series win

Fronting up to the media after one of the darker days of his recently extended coaching tenure, Darren Lehmann was defiantly refusing to succumb as softly or silently as so many of his batters over the preceding six hours.

"There's still a long way to go hopefully," Lehmann said with an admirably straight face before day three began with his last eight batsmen needing to find 388 runs to win the match.

Quick Single: Perera zooms into record books

Or survive for three full days of Test cricket to save it.

"Tomorrow's another day and hopefully we'll cope a lot better with the captain and vice-captain there," he added.

But within 20 minutes of the resumption of a match yet to find its midway point – under blue skies with only a distant hint of forecast thunderstorms – even Lehmann's stoic optimism must have crumbled as said vice-captain David Warner lost his wicket.

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In disturbingly familiar circumstances – pushing forward in the expectation of spin only to find the ball tracking unerringly straight on to his pad placed strategically in front of the stumps.

Another 19 minutes ticked by before aforementioned captain Steve Smith joined him in the dressing room for another bout of quiet reflection in a series that has provided few pauses but elicited many thoughts.

Smith was also beaten 'on the inside of the bat', although this time he was not a victim of wily left-arm veteran Rangana Herath but comparatively sprightly 34-year-old off-spinner Dilruwan Perera who was in the midst of proving Australia's susceptibility to spin was multi-denominational.

Having been dismissed on the charge in his first Test innings of this tour and then twice when on the crease, Smith employed his feet but found his fortune not turning as sharply as Perera's off-break which somehow deviated from pad to bat to thigh pad to leg slip.

Smith, Warner fall on third morning

From there, not even a doctor of spin would have dared suggest this Test was bound for a fourth day or a surprise twist and the end came with inevitability, if not haste, when the tourists were skittled for 183 in a whisker more than 50 overs.

To secure Angelo Mathews' unfancied, largely unknown beyond Sri Lanka team a 229-run win, the Warne-Muralidaran Trophy for the first time since it was commissioned in 2007 and a place in history as the first Sri Lankan outfit to win consecutive Tests against Australia.

A victory as comprehensive as it was unexpected, with a very strong chance – given Australia's total inability to decipher spin – of becoming a three-nil whitewash next week in Colombo where the SSC Stadium for the final Test is doubtless being reduced to dust well before it had settled on the Galle match.

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The world's number one-ranked Test team had come into this series preaching the importance of each player devising an individual game plan that would enable them to succeed on dry, turning tracks, and stressing the importance of sticking to that regime 'from ball one'.

Adam Voges, who has looked one of Australia's more competent specialist batters in what is admittedly a small sample across two Tests, revealed that it was permissible to rewrite those plans mid-Test provided such an alteration is flagged at the outset.

They look lost against our spinners: Mathews

And so when Warner departed, Voges began his innings with a reverse-sweep – a shot notably absent from his original manifesto – 'from ball one', and the boundary it netted emboldened him to stick with it.

He unfurled more than half a dozen of them throughout his 70-ball stay of an hour-and-a-half, none of them quite carrying the conviction that Sri Lanka tailender Herath showed when using it expansively the afternoon prior, and it was no huge surprise when it cost him his wicket.

Trying to paddle a ball that pitched outside leg and went on with Perera's golden arm to clatter into middle and leg stump.

Pitch-perfect Perera makes Sri Lankan history

A dismissal that makes a mockery of the quaint rule that stipulates a batter struck on the pads against a delivery pitching infinitesimally outside leg stump cannot be given out, but becomes fair game to one that lands a metre or two outside off if it's deemed to heading vaguely in the direction of the stumps.

Quick Single: Lehmann warns change is in the air

As Mitchell Marsh discovered to his undisguised disgust when he padded up to left-arm wrist spinner Lakshan Sandrakan – a star in the opening Test who bowled just two deliveries in the first innings at Galle and wasn't introduced into the all-spin attack until the 24th over of the second.

Marsh felt he had safely negotiated the ball that pitched well beyond the tall allrounder's outstretched front leg but spun sharply to strike him beneath the left thigh, and English umpire Richard Kettleborough agreed.

But the Sri Lankans saw something different, and the DRS ball-tracking technology showed the ball veering at virtually right angles across the pitch to hit leg stump, and Australia limped to lunch on 7-133.

The 10 Aussie wickets that handed SL a series win

Still 280 adrift of the coach's lofty goal, and only a wicketkeeper and a handful of bowlers to get them there.

Where it was Herath (nine wickets) and Sandakan (seven) who bamboozled with their complementary left-arm spin at Pallekele, it was Perera's regulation off-spin – with an arm ball for variation – the tourists could find no answer for at Galle.

Quick Single: Herath comes full circle in finest hour

Having learned to land the ball consistently and uncomfortably on a spot from the Sri Lankan spin master (and series trophy co-nominee) Muthiah Muralidaran – who spent two weeks helping the Australians better understand spin prior to the first Test – Perera finished with match figures of 11-99.

The best match figures by a Sri Lankan off-spinner since Muralidaran retired with an unprecedented 800 Test scalps.

Fittingly, the game ended with a flash of Sri Lankan brilliance, and not surprisingly it was engineered by 21-year-old batting prodigy Kusal Mendis.

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Squatting at short leg as Peter Nevill dashed down the pitch to try and flick Herath through square leg, he gathered the ball cleanly and in the same motion backhanded it on to the stumps to find the Australian 'keeper despairingly short of his ground.

The sort of instinctive game-changing intervention that has characterised Sri Lanka's approach to this series which now sits safe in their keeping.

And which has been so glaringly absent from Australia's effort that began with such high hopes but appears destined to end in examination and recriminations.