“So it’s just about communicating that: anything off the surface, any changes from the bowlers’ hands, any swinging, any movement, just to keep communicating. Something that we do really well in the middle, to be fair. He’s one that takes the information and uses it to his batting, so it’s something that we feed off each other quite nicely. And that was mainly the idea out there, just to have us clear plans going into each over and just dialling in on it.”
Greaves scored 180 in 325 balls, his third century in just his 16th Test, taking forward a happy habit of converting his fifties into hundreds, and hundreds into big hundreds. Greaves has just one half-century to go with his three centuries, which have been scores of 115 not out (also in North Sound), 202 not out (in Christchurch), and now 180.
“Very good innings. He’s shown that he’s capable of scoring runs in all conditions against all bowling line-ups. He’s a class player,” Hope said of his partner. “I love to see him go about his business, his preparation, and [he] then it just relays into on-the-field stuff. So very pleased for him. I hope that he continues in this vein and there’s a lot more runs for him to come.”
Of his own innings, Hope said the trick was to “stay in the zone” and “understanding what the team required in that particular moment”.
“We saw what transpired in the first innings from the Sri Lankan point, where their batters stood up. It wasn’t a surface that you can just blast the team out. So it was very important for myself adjusting to give them a little bit more of a hard time out there batting,” Hope said. “So, yeah, just happy to get those runs under my belt and obviously, by extension, trying to get us in a strong position to, hopefully, it would have been to demand victory.
“But now it’s about giving ourselves as much time out to the game as we possibly could in that stage of the game.”
As things stand at the end of the fourth day, Sri Lanka are 142 runs ahead with eight second-innings wickets in hand. They declared on 549 for 9 batting first before stopping West Indies at 499. An unbroken 60-run stand between Dinesh Chandimal and Kamindu Mendis then took their cause forward. Chandimal and Kamindu have scored at a run rate of 5.07 so far, and Sri Lanka would hope for more of the same to give themselves the chance of declaring early on the last day and giving their bowlers a shot at securing victory.
“Yeah, it’s a sticky one, to be fair, because a few quick wickets that we can get, then we can probably demand or have an upper hand in the game,” Hope said. “But it could also go the flip side. They can come out and score pretty quickly and then put us on a bit of pressure. So I think both sides have a big part to play, especially in that first hour, maybe first two hours of the day tomorrow.
“And then I think you’ll be able to have a better understanding of how the game is going to play out. But in the game of cricket, you know how it goes. You never know what’s going to happen until the last ball is bowled.”
