Sri Lanka have won four.Muralitharan swung the course of the match with a spell of 4 for 8, among them Lara, after lunch on the second afternoon, when the last six West Indies wickets tumbled for 39. On the opening day, he had eked out just 1 for 104 from 40 overs.It was an actual and psychological setback from which West Indies never recovered. Their attack, without a frontline bowler with 50 Test wickets, conceded a first-innings deficit of 142 and left Muralitharan with time to torment his weary opponents.They started the day with their hopes of avoiding what was their 19th defeat in their last 23 Tests away from the Caribbean resting with Lara and captain Carl Hooper. Lara has shown genuine enthusiasm since arriving in Sri Lanka. He said after his first- innings performance that his aim is to push his waning batting average back up above 50 to be “among the big boys again”, for which read Sachin Tendulkar and Steve Waugh.Twice he called for pain-killers during an hour and 40 minutes in which he scored 40 and overcame Muralitharan’s threat.

But noticeably relaxing in the first over from a lesser off-spinner, Thilan Samaraweera, he chipped a catch to midwicket. By then West Indies were 131 for 6 and plunging towards ignominy.Their two young batsmen, Daren Ganga and Ramnaresh Sarwan, had batted through the first hour and 10 minutes of the day in adding 67. Once they were out in successive overs, Ganga sweeping the left-arm spinner Niroshan Bandaratilleke to square leg for 33 and Sarwan snapped up at silly point off Muralitharan for 33, and Hooper followed with a careless drive to extra cover, it was all up to Lara. But it was too much even for him.The second of the three back-to-back Tests starts in Kandy on Wednesday.. England’s selectors appear to have confirmed what had been long suspected. In summoning men called Ball and Dawson to their winter ranks it seems clear that they at last concede the country’s spin bowlers are a bunch of comedians.

Indeed, both Martyn Ball and Richard Dawson are in deadly earnest about the task which lies ahead.Put bluntly, they have been asked as uncapped and unsung cricketers to try to curb the most formidable players of slow bowling in the world on their own pitches. They are not quite alone, for Ashley Giles, the left-armer who performed admirably in Pakistan and Sri Lanka last winter will surely play if his Achilles tendon recovers in time, and there are three occasional off-spinners in Michael Vaughan, James Ormond and Mark Ramprakash. But that hardly diminishes the difficulty of their task.It is worth attempting to put this into context. Ball is 31 and was picked – nominally from Gloucestershire but in reality from nowhere – when Robert Croft withdrew. Dawson is a 21-year-old Yorkshireman and until this season, when he left university, had never played in the Championship. Last March, Shane Warne, the world’s top spin bowler and one of the five cricketers of the 20th century, had total figures of 5 for 398 in the two matches in India which Australia lost.If Ball and Dawson have heard about this they are unfazed. Looking, in truth, more like Little and Large, they expounded their heartening theories on what might happen in the next few weeks.

“I’m going out there thinking something great might happen, you could come back as a bit of a legend,” said Dawson, the younger and leaner of the two, who is 6ft 3in tall. “There’s no point thinking you are going to get rattled around and take none for 300.”Ball, who is 5ft 9in and stocky, said: “It’s a good opportunity. They are a fearsome batting line-up in their own country but I’d rather bowl at them on one of those wickets than a shirt-front at Trent Bridge. If it’s giving you a bit you’ve got a chance if you bowl well and put it in the right areas.”To anybody who saw V V S Laxman and Rahul Dravid putting the Australians to the sword in Calcutta there is a huge element of na?ty in these statements. But perhaps neither man’s optimism should be disabused.The choice of Dawson is either a bold and visionary departure or a reckless gamble which could affect the rest of his promising career. He has played only 10 first-class matches and it was the sixth of those which probably propelled him to the front of the selectors’ thoughts for this tour.Yorkshire’s match against Lancashire was televised, and in the second innings Dawson took four wickets with intelligent slow bowling which used flight, turn and changes of pace. A few days later at Scarborough he took six Glamorgan wickets in an innings There was obviously something there “I have been given a chance,” he said.