SL, SA seek Super League surge, weather permitting

If you wanted to make a movie about the ODI series between Sri Lanka and South Africa in Colombo that starts on Thursday, you might style it as a spaghetti western. A B-grade gunslinger hulks at each end of a dusty, deserted street where all that moves in the neon sunlight is the odd lonesome tumbleweed, the batwing doors of the saloon quivering in the hot, dry breeze, and the twitch of the moustaches on the sweaty top lips of said gunslingers.

But you couldn't call it the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Because not a lot about these teams has been good in this format lately. Sri Lanka have lost their last four ODI series. South Africa have won only one of their last four rubbers, albeit two have been drawn. The Lankans are in 11th place on the World Cup Super League (WCSL) standings, the South Africans a place above.

Both teams have won two of the matches that feature on that table. The difference is that the South Africans have played half as many games as the Lankans' dozen. To put that into perspective, Bangladesh have also played 12 WCSL matches and won eight of them to lay claim to second place behind England. There's more context in the fact that Bangladesh's coaching staff is strewn with South Africans, who helped engineer