It is a slightly odd assertion, given that it started with them losing their first three wickets for six runs and limping to the first lunch break at 80 for five, but for most of the opening two days of this game Sri Lanka played well. They fought back to post an acceptable first-innings score, and their efforts in the field on Thursday were enterprising and regularly rewarded. But until Angelo Mathews and Kamindu Mendis led a late fightback, they flirted dangerously with marking the day that Manchester launched its annual Pride festival by surrendering their own.

At least Mathews regained his. Having failed to score in his team’s first innings and then punctuated their efforts in the field with a succession of half-hearted ball chases – at 37 he is perhaps not at his most athletic – in their second, and with his side in dire need, he batted his side, if not anywhere near ascendancy, at least back into the game.

Related: Sri Lanka dig in after Jamie Smith lays platform for England’s victory push

At times he conjured memories of his great innings at Headingley a decade ago, before he fell for 65 to a combination of Chris Woakes and a changed and swinging ball. England will be grateful that similarities with that 2014 match did not get any more pronounced: on that occasion Sri Lanka scored 257 in the first innings and England made 365 in reply – an almost identical script to this game – before Mathews struck 160 to set up a comeback victory. Sri Lanka continue to dream of a similar outcome in 2024.

Mathews sauntered past the mark of 1,000 Test runs against England in just his 12th game against them, supported by Mendis, who by stumps had passed 50 for the fifth time in just seven Test innings. Together they provided an infusion of the kind of class and quality which for a while Sri Lanka had misplaced. Combined with news that Dinesh Chandimal had not, as feared, had his thumb broken by a Mark Wood short ball, and a couple of dropped catches, they helped their side’s outlook track the day’s weather – initially dismal but brightening across the afternoon.

The first sign of trouble came before play even started, which was the puzzling moment Sri Lanka chose to make the first significant change to their field. Jerusalem played, the players came on, Prabath Jayasuriya got ready to bowl, and then everything stopped for a couple of minutes while some pads were brought on to allow Nishan Madushka to take up a position close to the bat. It seemed strange, chaotic, unplanned, all the more so when, once safely protected, Madushka ambled over to backward point. A few overs later the pads were called for once again, and this time he spent the next over at midwicket, and the one after that at gully.

It was as if Sri Lanka had been caught cold by a completely unexpected outbreak of cricket. If they were certainly cold – players running around the field in awkward waddles, hands thrust deep in their pockets; Madushka rolling up his trousers to put on those pads and revealing a pair of long johns underneath; substitute fielders huddling under blankets – they could certainly have been expected to finalise and communicate some kind of plan before their first bowler was at the end of what in Jayasuriya’s case can only be described as a walk-up.

It was not the only sign of muddled thinking. Having conceded just one run, Jayasuriya was replaced by Asitha Fernando, who after a single over of his own – featuring, to be fair, two Jamie Smith boundaries – was replaced again by Jayasuriya. “We probably weren’t at our best,” deadpanned Ian Bell, Sri Lanka’s bowling coach, of this period. Those runs took Smith to 86, and close enough to triple figures for nerves to start rattling, at which point Sri Lanka switched to defensive fields and he plodded to his century. At one stage there were 52 successive balls that went for either one run or none, and nine overs off which England scored just 10. The bowling was disciplined, certainly, but the proactivity and positivity that marked the tourists’ performance in the field on Thursday was absent. England’s overnight lead of 23, with four wickets remaining, had been inflated to 122 by the time the last fell.

Which was when things turned really grizzly. England’s innings ended just before 1pm and would normally have signalled lunch, but in an effort to make up for the overs lost to rain on Thursday the first session was extended by an additional 15 minutes. Sri Lanka were two down well before the interval.

Wood was held in reserve for a while, and once introduced immediately produced a beast of a delivery that jagged into Dimuth Karunaratne and flew, via edge and thigh, to Harry Brook in the slips. It was the first time the 34-year-old had taken a wicket with his first ball of an innings, but also not exactly unprecedented: in Sri Lanka’s first innings he produced something extraordinarily similar with the first ball of his second over. By then Mathews was at the crease and starting to purr; now the question is which Sri Lanka will turn up on Saturday morning.