Lanka on Windies way

Unending defeats, falling standards and administrative apathy are pushing Sri Lankan cricket to new low every day. With each defeat, the anger among the fans is growing. It has all the signs of reaching a tipping point, and before it is too late, the powers that run the game in the Island nation need to get their act together.

Home to some of the world-class players over the last quarter of a century – from Aravinda de Silva to Mahela Jayawardene, Sanath Jayasuriya to Kumar Sangakkara and Chaminda Vaas to Muttiah Muralitharan – Lanka’s current stock of players fails miserably in comparison to their immediate past.

Until three years ago, they boasted players of the calibre of Jayawardene, Sangakkara and Tillakaratne Dilshan and now the only two players of some standing are an ageing Lasith Malinga and Angelo Mathews who is going through a prolonged bad patch. It reflects poorly on the administrators of the game in the country that they failed to put in place a succession plan. Having seen the highs of the World Cup (1996) and the World T20 (2014) triumphs, cricket in the Emerald Isles is facing an existential crisis at the moment. Always a formidable force in their own conditions, Lanka hit their lowest point when they crashed to a 2-3 defeat (ODIs) to Zimbabwe in early July.

After presiding over the 168-run loss in the fourth ODI, Sri Lanka’s biggest in terms of runs, Malinga alluded to the fact that there was no proper supply chain to the national squad. The pacer argued that with the likes of Jayawardene, Sangakkara, Dilshan and Thilan Samarweera serving the country for several years, a generation of cricketers was lost to Lankan cricket. The experienced players in domestic cricket had only two-three years left in their careers when the stalwarts retired and that’s the reason so much void is being felt at the moment. 

“If that generation was here, we wouldn’t have an inexperienced team like this at international level,” Malinga pointed out. “We had players like Chamara Silva, Thilina Kandamby, Jehan Mubarak, Malinga Bandara, Kaushal Lokuarachchi, Kaushal Weeraratne, Tharanga Paranavitana, Malinda Warnapura… Those players played about 10 years of domestic cricket by the time they were 29 or 30, and played internationals for two or three years, and then they were out of the international scene. We lost those 10-12 years of experience that they had. It’s really hard to get that experience from a fresh-out-of-school cricketer or a club cricketer. The loss of that generation is being felt in our cricket. If they had still been here, we would have had the ability to field 6 or 7 experienced players in the team. When I started playing in 2004, there were 7 or 8 experienced players in the team. A few years ago we lost that. Now our cricket has declined,” he lamented.

One way of keeping a constant supply line, former skipper Arjuna Ranatunga thinks, is to revive school cricket – believed to be the best in world.  

“We have the best school cricket system in the world, but the standards have gone down very badly,” he rued. “Like in 1981-82, we used to have at least five to seven cricketers to the national squad. We used to have about 30-member squads, but you can't find a single cricketer from school to play even in the second XI. So something is wrong somewhere. So when I contested for the post of SLC vice-president (which he lost), I told them that I was not going to get involved too much because I'm a minister. ‘I'm going to handle school cricket.’ That was my dream -- to get school cricket back to the same standards when we were playing.”

There are a handful of youngsters who have the potential to carry forward the legacy of Lankan cricket, but that talent needs to be nurtured with care. And for that to happen each concerned with the team has to be in sync with the other so that the objective of reviving the game is accomplished. Lankan batting great Aravinda de Silva, in a recent interview, felt the players needed to be given the confidence about their ability.

 “The support staff, the coaches, the selectors, the administrators – everyone has to back them and have belief in them so that they have no doubts about their ability,” he observed. “If the selectors pick someone and the coach, the support staff and the captain have doubts, I think then it tends to get a bit shaky. You need to be a strong unit, work together and try and support each through these times and not chop and change. Drastic changes is not going to help, it is only going to shatter confidence.”

Flawed selectorial policies and interference in team’s affairs on a regular basis, too, have their role to play for the current situation. Graham Ford quit as coach in frustration after finding too many impediments in managing the team while interim coach Nic Pothas felt too many cooks were spoiling the broth. Though he was forced to retract his statement, the message wasn’t lost on anyone.                     

Ugly as it was to see Sri Lanka fans resorting to bottle-throwing and interrupting the third ODI against India in Pallekele last week, it also showed that they cared for the game. The series of losses over the last six months or so had tested their patience to the limit and while there is no justification for such violent behaviour, the worse that can happen to Lankan cricket is the fans turning their backs on the game. There is a danger of the public, the biggest stake holders, developing an indifferent attitude towards cricket and once that cynicism takes firm roots, it’s difficult to pull the game out of that morass. One need not look beyond West Indies to understand the gravity of the situation.