Sri Lanka Cricket’s hypocrisy exposed
MONDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2010 00:00
Ageing horses making a mockery of so-called development programmes
Sri Lankan cricket selectors, no matter who gets in there, have done it again. They picked a band of ageing horses like they always did, this time for the Asian Games that concluded in China yesterday. The result, not even a bronze medal won.
Cricket followers may have been too pre-occupied with the current home series with the West Indies in Sri Lanka than to find out who these blokes sent to China were. But the names make interesting reading. Jehan Mubarak, who captained a so-called Wayamba team, to be massacred at the recent Champions Trophy in South Africa, Jeewantha Kulatunga, Nuwan Zoyza, Gayan
Wijekoon, Chinthaka Jayasinghe, Kaushal Weeraratne, Malinga Bandara, Sajeewa Weerakoon, Isuru Udana, Indika de Saram and Kaushal Lokuarachchi. Come the next second grade tour, and the experts could bet these same blokes would be there once again.
Why? It’s so simple. These guys cannot get a place in the
Sri Lanka Test, ODI or T-20 team and so they will be kept happy with these tours where they could collect their due payments and have a good time, win or lose.
The end result is that the pompous boast of Sri Lanka Cricket president D. S. de Silva that young players are being nurtured and under-privileged schoolboys in the provinces provided with equipment, is being mocked at and the scroll fit for the nearest garbage dumb.
Could not the selectors have sent a team of under-19 schoolboy cricketers to this international event or a team from the Academy, not to win but to give them a feel of the future?
It appears that ground realities exist only on paper with nothing practical to go by thanks to the flamboyance of Sri Lankan cricket officials, who are at their brilliant best gracing launching ceremonies and media circuses and banging the doors of flashy cars. What happens to the manager's reports of these tours or what is in it is the question that begs for answers.
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