India built a fake day-four Galle pitch in Colombo, then let schoolboys bowl on it
India’s coaching staff found a patch of uncurated turf at the NCC in Colombo, measured 22 yards across it and sent schoolboy spinners at their top order. The first Test in Galle on 15 August is the reason.
Aug 9, 2026
Somewhere at the Nondescripts Cricket Club in Colombo there is a stretch of turf nobody has rolled, watered or prepared for a game of cricket. Grass grows on it in uneven tufts. Cracks have opened on their own. The soil sits loose in places. Before their tour match started, India’s coaching staff walked out with a tape measure, marked 22 yards across that mess, and made it the most useful practice pitch of the trip.
The idea is to bat on something worse than Galle
Head coach Gautam Gambhir and batting coach Sitanshu Kotak abandoned one of the proper practice strips to do it. A curated net gives a batter predictable bounce and a spinner predictable grip, which is useful for grooving a technique and close to useless for the specific problem India face on 15 August. Galle on day four does not behave. It grips, then skids. It keeps one ball low and lifts the next off a length. A batter who has spent a week facing well-mannered off-spin on a rolled surface has prepared for the wrong Test match.
So the staff went looking for chaos and built it instead. The cracks were already there. The uneven grass was already there. All the tape measure did was turn a piece of neglected ground into a version of a fourth-day surface, and India’s top order into the people who had to survive it.
Jadeja and Kuldeep first, then the schoolboys
The senior spinners bowled on it to begin with. Ravindra Jadeja and Kuldeep Yadav took their turns, which is the part of the drill that makes obvious sense: India’s two most accomplished slow bowlers, on a surface that rewards them, against batters who need the work.
What came next is the bit worth noticing. Once Jadeja and Kuldeep had finished their stints, a handful of schoolboy spinners were marshalled onto the same strip and told to let rip. No lines to hold, no plans to execute, no captain setting a field. One ball from a lanky schoolboy off-spinner gripped in the grass and jumped off a length. The next passed the batter’s grille. The one after that skidded under the bat. India’s frontline batters queued up and took turns on it anyway.
It is a smarter drill than it sounds. Facing Jadeja teaches you Jadeja. Facing teenagers who are not trying to be anyone in particular, on a strip where the ball can do anything, teaches you to read the pitch rather than the bowler. Tests in this part of the world get lost in exactly that gap, when a batter plays the reputation and the surface does something else entirely.
Why the preparation is this deliberate
India arrived in Sri Lanka early and filled the time. Two three-hour sessions at the NCC went in before the three-day tour match against a Sri Lanka Cricket XI at the same ground from 7 to 9 August, and there are six days between the end of that game and the first Test. The second Test follows at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo from 23 August.
Gambhir has been blunt about what all of it is for. “Come 15th morning, whether we are batting first, whether we are bowling first, we’re absolutely ready with every answer,” he said ahead of the tour game.
He has reason to want the margin. Jasprit Bumrah was ruled out of the series with the left knee injury he picked up fielding in an ODI against England in Cardiff in July, days after he had been included subject to a fitness test, and the uncapped Jammu and Kashmir seamer Auqib Nabi came in for him. Washington Sundar misses the first Test with a leg injury carried over from that same England series. Sai Sudharsan is out of Galle with a stress fracture in his big toe, and his availability for the Colombo Test is in doubt. That is a lot of the plan gone before a ball has been bowled, and it loads more onto the spinners and onto a top order that has to bat long on surfaces built to stop them.
The tour game has done its job too
The warm-up itself has been useful rather than flattering. The Sri Lanka Cricket XI’s young batters made 363 for 8 declared on a flat NCC pitch on the opening day, with Jadeja, Manav Suthar and Kuldeep taking two wickets each and Kuldeep getting through the heaviest workload of the innings. India replied with 357 for 6 declared, built around Devdutt Padikkal’s unbeaten 142, and that came after Vishwa Fernando had removed Yashasvi Jaiswal for a two-ball duck with his second delivery of the innings.
None of it decides anything about Galle. What it gives India is overs in the heat for the bowlers and time in the middle for batters who will be picked partly on it, with Padikkal in line to fill Sudharsan’s place in the top order. India go into the series fifth in the World Test Championship table on 48.15 per cent.
The uncurated strip is the part that should matter more. Two Tests in Sri Lanka are usually settled by which side copes once the pitch starts misbehaving, and India have spent their build-up making sure the misbehaviour is not a surprise.