Weather bosses all again as third day's play ends at 5.2 overs
In that time, Sri Lanka moved briskly, from 263/6 to 282/6. Dhananjaya de Silva made 15 of those runs to move within 13 runs of his sixth Test century. But in the larger scheme of things, it meant very little, as time has significantly run out for the Test to produce a result.
Play began belatedly on Friday, 13 December, as it had on the previous day, as the first session was abandoned due to a wet outfield that had taken a significant pounding with all the overnight rain.
It wasn't until past 11:00am that the Sri Lankan team arrived at the ground. Three-quarters of an hour later, the covers were peeled off, and it took an hour and fifteen minutes of painstaking work by the groundstaff to get the pitch and outfield ready for play.
Shaheen Shah Afridi delivered the first ball of the day, continuing his unfinished over from day two, to rousing cheers from the crowd, and de Silva cracked the third ball he faced from him through the covers for four, for the first runs of the morning.
Naseem Shah began proceedings from the other and seemed a lot more potent than Afridi. While the left-arm paceman had largely bowled full and straight without finding much movement in the air or off the deck, Naseem prodigiously swung the ball away from the right-hander and occasionally threatened the outside edge.
None of that, however, stopped de Silva from crunching a boundary in front of square, with an imperious pull. Two balls later, the light meter came out, and the players went in. And it would remain that way for the rest of the day.