Photo: AFP
Andy Balbirnie did really well in a cricket game and scored 95 runs to help Ireland get 319 points. They played against Sri Lanka in a place called Galle. This happened on Monday.
Ireland did much better in the second game of cricket after losing badly in the first game. At the end of the day, Lorcan Tucker scored 78 points without being out and Curtis Campher scored 27 points and was also not out.
Ireland’s cricket team made three changes to their lineup and then got worried when one of their players, Peter Moor, only scored five runs. They became even more nervous when the player who was a hero in Sri Lanka’s first Test, Prabath Jayasuriya, took out another Irish player, James McCollum, who had only scored 10 runs.
Captain Balbirnie and his teammate Paul Stirling worked together to score a lot of points in very hot and sweaty weather. They did this even after their other teammate Harry Tector was out.
This was the best teamwork Ireland has ever had in their short time playing Test cricket. They did even better than they did in their very first Test match in 2018.
Balbirnie almost scored 100 runs in a special game called Test cricket, but he got out just before he could reach that number. He did really well though, because he had never scored that many runs before in this kind of game.
Balbirnie said that he wanted to score a lot of points, but he is still happy because he helped his team do well.
We are a new team in cricket and we are happy with what we did today. We need to keep doing well and not waste any opportunities.
The boys did a really great job of coming back after not doing well in the first game.
Stirling, who didn’t play in the first game, did really well in the second game. He hit the bad balls really hard and scored 50 runs in his first ever Test match.
He was playing a really good game, but he had to stop because his muscles were hurting too much. He hit the ball 74 times, and six of them went far and three went even farther! It took him 133 tries to hit all those balls.
Tucker got out in a game of cricket, but the team that was supposed to catch him didn’t do it right. The person in charge of the other team could have asked someone to check if Tucker was really out, but he decided not to.
Ireland did really well in a game called Test cricket and scored a lot of points. It’s the second highest score they’ve ever gotten in this game. The highest score they ever got was against another team called Pakistan in 2018.
The person who helps the Sri Lanka cricket team with their spinning balls said that he thinks the players who throw the spinning balls could have done a better job.
The ground is flat, but we could have tried harder and worked more carefully.
Ramesh Mendis has been playing for a long time, but he keeps making the same mistake over and over again.
Ireland has been playing a new kind of cricket game that takes five days to finish. They haven’t won any of these games since they started playing in 2017. They lost all five games they played, including one against Bangladesh in April.