Kumar Sangakkara made England pay for dropping him

Alastair Cook had a nightmare in the sixth one-day international. He dropped a catch then, as evidence of a scrambled mind, was lbw to his second ball playing across a straight one.
England, at this early stage of their white-ball evolution, can afford a captain who opens the batting but does not score at a run a ball. They cannot afford a captain who drops a simple chance offered by the opposition’s ace batsman.

Kumar Sangakkara had scored 41 – not much by your standards if you have reached 50 in one-day internationals on no fewer than 110 occasions, as he had at the time – when he stepped back to Ravi Bopara and drove a low catch to Cook at mid-off.

The ball travelled to Cook at knee-height. It was middled, but not really leathered, and anyway Sangakkara’s weight was falling away from the shot. At almost every level of the game you would have expected it to be caught.

Cook went down on one knee as the ball reached him. England’s captain must have been tempted to go down on both after the ball left him, trickling to earth.