In general, umpires do not need an excuse to do their job badly in Sri Lanka. Over the last four years, there has been an abundance of botched decisions, over-officiousness, as well as a banning of papare bands in the stands while the over is in motion, so that the umpires can supposedly hear edges better. Not that stopping the bands has helped them. Replays have demonstrated several out decisions in which the bat has clearly been in a separate administrative district from the ball.
In the umpires' partial defence, they have it especially tough in Sri Lanka. The prevalence of spinners and dustbowls means there are faint nicks, bat/pad chances and lbw opportunities galore. In some games, there are almost more appeals than runs. And, although there have been none at the grounds in this series, it is possible there are wilfully insubordinate papare bands playing elsewhere on the island, despite being told repeatedly that they confound the umpires' sensitive hearing, and generally confuse them. I mean, when there is a highly serious Test match being played, is it not time the ICC imposed a nationwide ban on fun?
And yet, while it has been well known for some time that umpires are junkies for terrible decisions in Sri Lanka, the nation's own cricketers have enabled them, routinely burning their two reviews early in the innings.
If umpires were shoddy drivers, then Sri Lanka's cricketers would still hand them the keys to new luxury cars and point them in the direction of the nearest power pylon. If they were known public urinators, Sri Lanka would ply them with gallons of soft drink and follow them around putting fire hydrants in their vicinity.
On Friday, for the second consecutive innings, Sri Lanka lost both reviews at an unacceptably early stage of the game. In the second innings at Pallekele, they had waited with relative patience until the start of the 27th over to squander their second review. At the SSC, they were both spent before the end of the 22nd - the first on a prospective caught behind off Jonny Bairstow in the 15th over; the second being an lbw appeal against Joe Root, in which Root's front pad was shown to be closer to his childhood home in Yorkshire than the line of off stump when it was struck.
Party to both terrible review decisions was wicketkeeper Niroshan Dickwella. With the bat, in limited-overs cricket, Dickwella is the dynamic, hyper-energetic opening batsman, sending the third ball of the match over the wicketkeeper's head, sweeping and reverse-slapping with abandon, and generally attempting to be the man who Dickscoops his way into a nation's hearts (the Dickscoop being his particular version of the Dilscoop). But in whites, 24 Tests in, he is yet to step up as a batsman. Worse, he is prone to fits of acute DRS fancy. If there was a Dickwella DRS flowchart, all the arrows would ultimately point to the box that reads: REVIEW IT! At nightclubs, if he hears a song he doesn't like, you can imagine him racing up to the DJ, making a "T" with his forearms, disbelievingly shaking his head.
In a series in which Sri Lanka have had dollops of bad luck, losing their captain to a groin strain, losing all three tosses, and generally being on the receiving end of the umpires' bumbling, of course the squandered reviews would come back to floor them. Ben Stokes should have been out lbw on zero off the bowling of Dilruwan Perera, but that appeal was wrongly turned down, and Stokes would go on to smack 57 off the next 75 balls, putting up a 99-run stand with Bairstow in the process. Later in the day, Bairstow would himself miss a sweep off Lakshan Sandakan to a ball that would have taken out leg stump, but was ruled not out. In the first two sessions of day one, it seemed it would have been easier to get the umpires to sign over deeds to their houses than get an lbw decision out of them, and Sri Lanka had no recourse to challenge.
Towards the end of the day, Sri Lanka's DRS misadventures were put into sharp relief by England. In between being dropped twice, by Dickwella and Dimuth Karunaratne at slip, Moeen Ali was given out lbw twice, and overturned those calls on both occasions. Unlike Sri Lanka, England had saved their reviews until the umpires' inevitable mistakes actually came against them.