Lanka seemed a team run out of ideas

On the other hand, India were four or five steps ahead of the tourists in the top-order and end game planning.

Logic suggested that if major changes were to be made for the Vadodara game, Russel Arnold should have opened and not Thilan Samaraweera – replacement for Jayasuriya in the last game.

Arnold has at least put some runs together on this tour and in the past has batted competently in the top-order. Poor Samaraweera, asking him to open the innings was the sort of folly you might expect of teams that have run out of ideas.

It put pressure on a man who has not faced a swinging white ball and against a new-ball attack of Irfan Pathan and Ajit Agarkar; it was always a risky element. Especially when it meant that Kumar Sangakkara, the team’s in-form batsman, would bat at three. It left young Upul Tharanga appearing decidedly amateurish against the moving ball and Samaraweera wondering if he had drawn the short straw.

At least Arnold knows how to handle the moving ball in such circumstance and with Sangakkara opening the innings, the top-order would have had a sense of experience as well as stability.

As it happened, Arnold — arriving at 85 for five with his captain, Marvan Atapattu, looking for someone to stabilise and set a target of sorts — firmly thrust his bat under the nose of the national selectors with a top-score of 68. The batsmen managed to tie a raft together and paddle the innings out of the rapids of further destruction.

Whether the selectors, already rapped over the knuckles by the island’s minister of sport Jeevan Kumaratunga, for initially selecting Jayasuriya in the Test squad of 15, and sent away to select a second squad, will acknowledge their error in axing Arnold is another matter.

Just who advised Kumaratunga that the Test squad with an unfit Jayasuriya was unacceptable is a debateable point. It could have been Arjuna Ranatunga, the former captain and deputy minister of tourism.

Anyway, India’s ability to set and chase down targets this series became so commonplace as to be an embarrassment for a bowling attack struggling for ideas. While Sri Lanka were bowled out four times and lost nine wickets in a fifth innings, India chased down five targets and made a meal of the Sri Lanka bowling.

While there are those on the island who keep on looking at the tour as one where Sri Lanka were finally exposed as lightweights, few are prepared to admit that a resurgent Team India were far too good.

Beware South Africa. Graeme Smith’s jingoism on arrival in Mumbai is the sort of pre-tour hype that carried the stale odours of what was said in Colombo and at Kanpur last year.

Only when the five-match series has ended can judgment be passed. Rhetoric is cheap, it is action that counts.